Most business software makes in-person card payments harder than they need to be. You buy a terminal from your processor, it lives on its own, and every sale gets entered twice — once into the software, once into the terminal. The amounts drift apart. Someone keys $340 instead of $34.00 and nobody notices until the end-of-day refuses to balance. The fix everyone reaches for is more care at the counter, which is another way of saying the process depends on nobody ever being tired.
How it works when the reader is part of the system
The cashier adds a payment to the order, chooses Card Reader, and the exact order total goes straight to the reader on the counter. The customer taps or inserts their card. The payment lands back on the order automatically. Nobody types an amount, so nobody can type it wrong, and the order and the day's takings agree because they were never two separate records in the first place.
It also behaves like every other tender. Because Card Reader sits in the same payment step as cash, check, and card-on-file, a split payment is not a special case — $50 in cash and $100 on the reader against a $150 order is the same flow, not a workaround.
What you do not need
- No app to install. The reader is driven over the internet from the browser you already use, so there is nothing to deploy to a till machine and nothing to keep updated.
- No local pairing. The reader does not connect to a particular computer, so it is not tied to one station and does not stop working when that station does.
- No new payment processor. You use the Square or Stripe account you already have, at the rates you already negotiated. Omni does not take a cut.
- No card numbers in Omni. The reader encrypts the card inside its own hardware the moment it is tapped, and sends it to your processor directly. Omni is told the payment succeeded — it never sees the number.
One honest clarification on that last point, because it is often oversold: the encrypted card data does travel over your own network, since that is the reader's route to the internet. The protection is that it is encrypted inside the reader before it leaves, so nothing sitting on your network can read it. Using an encrypting reader also reduces how much of PCI compliance applies to you, though it does not remove your obligations entirely — your payment provider is the right people to ask about your specific situation.
The readers that work with Omni
Omni drives countertop readers that connect over WiFi. Buy the reader directly from Square or Stripe — we do not resell hardware or mark it up.
- Square Terminal — around $299. Tap, chip and swipe, with a built-in screen and receipt printer. Handheld, so it works at a counter or away from one.
- Stripe WisePOS E — around $299. Tap, chip and swipe with a built-in customer screen. Stripe's recommended countertop reader.
- Stripe Reader S700 — around $419. The same setup as the WisePOS E, with a larger screen and faster hardware.
Setup takes ten to fifteen minutes and is mostly done on the reader itself. A Square Terminal is paired from inside Omni with a code you type on the reader. A Stripe reader is registered in your Stripe dashboard first, then pointed at from Omni.
Those are the readers Omni drives. If you already own something else, ask us before you assume it works — it takes a minute to check and saves buying twice.
The reader is not the hard part. The hard part is a terminal that does not know what the order says — and that is the part being removed.
Taking payments away from the counter
Not every sale happens at a till. If you sell at markets, deliver to customers, or quote and collect in someone's home, the Square Terminal is the one to buy: it is handheld, runs on WiFi, and takes the same tap and chip payments wherever it has a signal. Same reader, same setup, same flow — it just does not have to live on a counter.
A reasonable way to start
Buy one reader, not one per counter. Pair it, run a small payment through it and refund it, and take a week of real sales on it before you buy the rest. A reader that is right for your counter is obvious within a few days of actual use, and the cost of finding out is one device rather than five.