For many people, summer means one thing – festival season! And not just the millions of revellers that pack out major events like Glastonbury, Reading & Leeds, Download and Wireless.
The festival scene has become a major industry in its own right. With close to 1,000 festivals taking place across the UK every year, tens of thousands of people base their livelihoods around these events. Organisers, artists, food and drink vendors, stall owners, service providers, security and a whole army of seasonal workers put the hard yards in to ensure attendees have the best possible time.
For those in the festival industry, or outdoor events in general, now is the busiest time of year. Even if you’re not already heading to an event, you’re bound to be soon, and planning will be at an advanced stage.
For vendors of all types, one of the things to consider is how you will handle transactions in the middle of a big, potentially muddy field miles from the convenience of plugged-in POS system. The rise of digital payments and the move away from cash (many festivals even go cashless these days) has complicated life for festival traders. But as they say, the show must go on. Digital payments and electronic POS are the norm these days, even in the middle of a big muddy field.
So in amongst all the other event prep, you should spare some time considering whether your POS set-up is festival-ready. What devices do you have? Are they reliable? What will you do about power? What about connectivity?
If that sounds daunting, never fear. At Oxhoo, we’ve put together the following festival POS checklist to help you get ready.
Festival POS checklist
Essential equipment
First and foremost, you need a device you can run POS on. A lot of stall owners and independent vendors like the fact that you can download a POS app onto your smartphone these days. With an NFC contactless reader in the phone itself, or a separate card reader plugged in, you have a pocket-sized payment solution.
However, we’d recommend upgrading to a purpose-built POS tablet for two reasons. One, they are built for durability and resilience. And there’s no telling what your devices might have to survive amidst the hustle and bustle of a festival. And two, mobile POS devices come with all the peripherals you need ready to go. Or the extra ports to plug them in. In short, dedicated mobile POS devices are more reliable and more flexible, and more likely to work without a hitch throughout the event.
If you are involved in setting up larger site-wide concessions like, say, the official festival bars, you may want more traditional POS terminals that multiple members of staff can use. You may also want to network all your endpoints across the site. This is perfectly doable. The trick is to choose modular POS solutions that are easy to pack down and assemble and disassemble on site, rather than having to worry about transporting clunky units back and forth.
Other things to consider are back-up power units. Generators provide the main source of electricity for outdoor events. But it’s worth having a back-up supply like portable chargers and battery packs. Nowadays, the portable types that recharge from solar power are particularly useful.
The same goes for internet connectivity. As handy as modern cloud-based POS software and apps are, you do have to be connected to the internet for them to work properly. Wireless signal in crowded festivals can be notoriously unreliable. So you should take precautions like having back-up mobile hotspots, preferably via different mobile providers. And perhaps even more importantly, checking that the POS software you are using has an offline mode that allows it to continue working seamlessly when it is disconnected, storing data locally until it is online again.