CardAlpha's point of sale app converts your tablet or smartphone device into a powerful electronic cash register featuring a product catalogue with item description, prices, discounts and inventory tracking features.
You can then set-up a custom branded web-store featuring your logo, your business name, description and your products in attractive display "tiles". The Webstore can be accessed by your customers through your unique Webstore URL via a laptop, tablet or mobile device.
Via our App you can also set-up a merchant account with Stripe, so that your customers can pay for their purchases online via the web-store using our simple shopping basket feature.
Step 1: Download our ePOS app CardAlpha to your smartphone or tablet (Apple iPad or iPhone device)
Step 2: Select “SIGN UP” and provide your basic details.
If you operate as a Limited Company, we will require few details about yourself and your business including address, beneficial owner details, director's details etc. The App automatically connects to Companies House database to extract all available information to save you the hassle of entering details. You can also apply as a Sole Trader by selecting that option from within the App. Our App will also ask you to upload an image of your passport or driving license as an identity document, as well as an image of your recent bank statement (front page only).
Step 3: Select the type of payment product and service (Webstore with E-commerce payments in this case), review information about webstore pricing and transaction charges and provide necessary financial details
After you've uploaded details about your business and your identity documents, the App will present you with an option to choose your product type. In this case, as you are looking to sell your products/services online, you will select Webstore with E-commerce payments. The App will then share our pricing details, including the monthly subscription cost for the Webstore which is charged by CardAlpha, followed by the applicable charges for card transactions, which are applied by Stripe our payment processing partner. Once you confirm your acceptance of the pricing structure, we will require your anticipated or actual card volumes per month, ticket size of a typical card transaction, your annual sales turnover, etc. We will also ask you to provide details of a bank account where card settlements can be made. We will also use this account to charge the monthly subscription for the webstore. You will be asked to enter bank account details twice- once for Stripe, your merchant account provide for receiving settlements for E-commerce transactions ; and the other for Go Cardless, for subscription payments to be made for the Webstore, via direct debits.
Step 4: Our merchant partner, Stripe, will verify your details for account approval.
Once all the above details are collected, Stripe will perform underwriting and Anti Money Laundering checks against your application. If all checks are completed successfully, our App will inform you that you are ready to start accepting payments and also ready to receive payouts. You can then proceed to the next stage, accept CardAlpha's terms and conditions and log out of the App. The CardAlpha team will set-up your webstore within a couple of hours and you will receive a welcome email informing you of your next steps.
Step 5: Additional details required by Stripe
Stripe may require a few additional details before concluding AML & underwiting checks on your merchant account application. In such a case, our App will display a message stating that you are ready to start accepting payments but you may need to carry out a few additional verification tasks requested by Stripe. To do this, we recommend that you first proceed to the next stage accept CardAlpha's terms and conditions and log out of the App.
You should then log onto your Stripe dashboard account (https://dashboard.stripe.com/login), to complete any additional verification requirements. You will need to use the same email address and password details that you used, while creating your Stripe account via the CardAlpha App, to og onto your Stripe dashboard account.
Step 6: Webstore activation
Once either Step 4 or 5 are complete, log back onto the CardAlpa App, go to the help menu and select the Activate Webstore button. You will then be asked to choose a name-prefix for your webstore (e.g. mystore) and our solution will then create a Webstore for your business, available to your customers, at the web address, mystore.cardalpha.uk.
The cardalpha.uk suffix is mandatory however the prefix which contains your business brand (in the above example, it's mystore) is available to you to customise.
Step 7: Webstore customisation, delivery options etc
Your final step will be to customise your webstore by selecting the Customise Webstore sub-menu option, available under Help menu. You can, for example upload your business logo and specify options by which your customers can receive the products they've ordered. You have the option of turning on in-store pickups or/and deliveries.
Please note that CardAlpha do not provide integrated delivery services for webstore orders. As such any delivery options will need to be arranged directly by you, for your customers. To allow you to recover the cost of deliveries, you can specify delivery type names, e.g. Standard delivery (2 days) or Premium delivery (1 day) and specify a fee to be charged to the customer for any delivery. This delivery fee (including any VAT charge on delivery fee) will be added by our platform to the customer’s shopping basket amount, should they choose the delivery option.”
Another important point to note is that the CardAlpha platform treats delivery options provided by your business, as a separate transaction to the goods or services being sold by your business, to a customer. As such, if you are a VAT registered business, you need to turn on the VAT registered option above (toggle switch to green) and a standard rate VAT of 20% will apply to any delivery charge(s) that you specify under the Delivery options and charges menu button above. For any webstore purchase, where a customer requests you to deliver of goods/services to their address, both the delivery charge (based on the delivery options elected by the customer) and the VAT on the delivery charge will be added to the shopping basket amount payable by the customer. If you are not VAT registered, you can turn the toggle button off, and no VAT will be applied on delivery charges.
We charge a small monthly subscription of £5.99 + VAT to set-up and keep your web-store operational for your business. Our ePOS app which enables you to add or delete items from your web-store, change pricing or item images and descriptions, is available free of charge on the Apple App store and Google Play store.
Step 1: Log-in to our app on your smartphone or tablet device, using the log-in id and password you chose, when you signed up for CardAlpha.
Step 2: Add your store items to the ECR - electronic cash register within the app.
Add items to the electronic cash register (ECR) by keying in product descriptions, prices, VAT, product images, and inventory details or going to the Help section and requesting a batch upload file. The batch upload file allows you to upload many items at one go when you are building your product catalogue for the first time, and thereafter add additional items once you’ve built a product catalogue in the ePOS App.
Retail price per unit (ppu) : This is the original list price of the SKU item before any discounts.
Item level discount % or ID%: This is a percentage discount applicable to the retail price of an item.
Basket level discount % or BD%: It is the percentage discount applied to all items within a shopping basket, when processing a payments check-out for an in-store payment transaction. Basket level discounts are not applicable for Webstore and E-commerce payments.
Net price: It is the Retail price per unit (ppu) less any applicable discounts, multiplied by Quantity
VAT %: This is the applicable VAT %, with the VAT % amount based on what has been supplied during the creation of the Product catalogue.
Gross price: This is the Net price plus applicable VAT. This is the transaction price which is charged to the Cardholder.
For any questions or issues relating to the Point of Sale solution (the ePOS app) or Webstore you can contact us using the Chat option on the ePOS app. You can also email us at admin@cardalpha.com.
For any service issues related to card payments, settlements, chargebacks and any other queries related to your Stripe account, you can access support services for Stripe via this link (Stripe Support). We also recommend that you log onto your Stripe dashboard account (https://dashboard.stripe.com/login), to familiarise yourself with your Stripe account details and review information related to your payment transactions. Our ePOS App will also provide details of transactions successfully processed via Stripe.
CardAlpha is a financial technology company based in London. CardAlpha's ePOS App converts a small business owner's tablet or smartphone device into a powerful electronic cash register featuring a product catalogue with item description, prices, discounts, inventory tracking and digital receipts.
