There are several important issues, which any large-size merchant or payment facilitator needs to consider when it comes to implementation of a terminal solution.
Payment terminal
The first thing to consider is payment terminal fulfillment. The payment terminal supplier (order fulfillment center), dealing directly with the manufacturer, should have the required number of payment terminals of the required model available for sale. Another aspect to be kept in mind in fulfillment context is injection of encryption keys. As point-to-point encryption is rapidly gaining popularity (as an additional fraud protection means), the issue of third-party key injection becomes extremely relevant.
Terminal application
The second aspect to be addressed is the particular type of terminal application you are going to use in your terminals. Although there are many terminal applications available at the market, all of them belong to one of the two types. Terminal applications with a local footprint can be used only when additional software components are installed on the workstations, they are connected to. Common examples of such components are DLL libraries. The advantage of terminal applications without a local footprint is that no additional components need to be installed on a workstation.
You may or may not handle all the described issues in-house, but if you need to implement a terminal solution, you need to consider them carefully.
Find out more about terminal solution components in the respective article on #Paylosophy.