When the till or card machine stops: what to check before you close

The card machine declines. The till freezes. There is a queue, and someone is holding out a card that will not go through. It is one of the most stressful things that can happen in a small shop, cafe or salon. The good news is that most of these failures are not the machine breaking. They are the connection dropping, and a short list of checks usually finds the cause.

First: your aim is to keep trading

Before you diagnose anything, decide how you are going to take the next payment. Fixing the fault and keeping the shop trading are two separate jobs, and the second matters more in the moment. If you have a second card reader, get it out. If your provider has an app on a phone or tablet that can take a payment, that is your stopgap. Almost everyone in the queue is patient if you tell them plainly what is happening.

Is it the terminal, or is it the internet?

This is the most useful question, and everything follows from it. A card machine that is powered on, lit up and responding to button presses is almost certainly fine. What has usually failed is the connection between it and the outside world. Two quick tests separate the two.

• Pick up a phone that is connected to the shop wifi and try to load any website. If the phone cannot get online either, the problem is the connection, not the terminal.
• Turn the wifi off on that same phone so it uses mobile data instead. If pages now load fine, that confirms it: the shop internet is down and the phone network is not.

Check the router lights

The router is the box the broadband comes into, usually tucked in a back room or under a counter. Its lights tell you a surprising amount without you needing to understand any of the technical detail. Look at the labels next to them.

• A power light that is off means the power has been knocked out, or a plug or switch has been caught. Check the socket before anything else.
• A broadband or internet light that is red, orange or flashing when it is normally a steady green or blue means the line itself is down. That is one for your broadband provider, not for the terminal.
• All lights normal, but nothing can get online, points at the wifi or at a fault further along, and is worth a proper look.

Take a photo of the router while everything is working properly and keep it on your phone, so you can compare the lights against a known good picture.

The stopgap: mobile data or a hotspot

If the shop broadband is down but the mobile network is fine, a phone can stand in for it. Most phones can share their mobile connection, usually called a personal hotspot in the settings. Switch it on, then connect the card machine or tablet to the phone as you would to any wifi. Many terminals also have a mobile signal of their own and fall back to it automatically, so check whether yours has already reconnected before doing anything drastic.

Two cautions. Keep an eye on the phone's data allowance, and switch everything back once the broadband returns, or you will be quietly running the shop off a phone for days.

Power-cycle, and do it in the right order

Restarting things works far more often than it deserves to, but the order matters. Each device looks to the one upstream of it for a connection, so restarting them out of order means the later ones start up, find nothing there, and give up.

• Switch off the router at the plug and leave it off for about thirty seconds. Do not just press reboot, and never press the small recessed reset button, which wipes the settings.
• Plug it back in and wait for the lights to settle. This can take several minutes and it will look worse before it looks better.
• Only once the internet light is steady, restart the till or the card machine, once, and give it time.
• Then reconnect anything else that needs the network, such as a receipt printer.

When to stop and call someone

Stop when you have gone once round the checklist and it is still down, or sooner if the router shows a fault light on the broadband, the terminal will not power up, or you would have to change settings you do not recognise. If the fault is with the terminal or the payment account, your payment provider is the right first call, because only they can see your account. If it is the internet, the network or the till computer, that is where we come in.

Worth sorting before it happens again

• Know where your router is, what its lights normally look like, and which socket it is plugged into.
• Have a written fallback for taking payment that any member of staff can follow without ringing the owner.
• Keep the till and the card machine off the customer wifi, so a busy day does not slow your payments down.

We can look after the broadband, routers and networks that tills and card terminals depend on, for independent shops, cafes and salons across Sutton Coldfield and the surrounding West Midlands. If your setup has a habit of dropping out, call or email us and we will take an honest look at why.