Independent retailers everywhere are looking for ways to improve the shopping experience, extend loyalty programs and better engage with their customers. Now customers can check in with PayPal and check out at the register at nearly 2,000 merchants with the iPad POS solution from ShopKeep POS. With the launch of the PayPal partnership, nearly 2,000 merchants nationwide who use ShopKeep POS as their POS system can now accept PayPal cardless payments at the flat rate of 2.7 percent. ShopKeep’s cloud-based solution enables small businesses to add PayPal as a payment option into their existing point of sale systems without upgrading hardware.

Because of the cardless nature of the payments, it enables lines to move faster and because it is wireless, it has the ability to drive further traffic and sales to merchants and consumers. The PayPal customer simply checks in at participating merchants with his or her PayPal iPhone app and, at checkout, the customer’s name and photo appears on the ShopKeep POS iPad register. The cashier identifies the customer, finalizes the transaction, and the customer is automatically checked out of the store and receives a receipt by email. This point of sale solution enables brick and mortar retailers to efficiently ring up sales, manage inventory, build customer loyalty programs and remotely access real time sales.

I opened my first store in 2003. It was a wine store in Fort Greene in Brooklyn, called The Greene Grape and I realized pretty quickly that I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into.

I learned that when you run your own place, you are responsible for absolutely every aspect of it. You are running the books, managing inventory, training employees, looking into marketing promotions, forecasting for the coming months, trying to predict cash flow, cleaning the windows, scrubbing the floors and generally worrying that you’re forgetting something important.

In short, I found out that small business is hard. The hours are long, the worries constant and the market can seem incredibly fickle. It’s no secret that the failure rate for new small businesses in America is alarmingly high; across the country some 25 percent of new restaurants close their doors within the first year and 60 percent are gone within three years. These chances of success don’t exactly invite long nights of care-free and dreamless sleep. And yet, it is exactly the ability to break away from the worry and the day-to-day grind that enables a small business person to make good decisions and increase their chances of success.

One of the most overused quotes in business is, ‘Genius is 1 percent Inspiration, 99 percent Perspiration’. Young entrepreneurs are told that the right idea is only a small part of the equation and that, in reality, success comes from putting your nose to the grindstone and working long hours. Over the years, I’ve been exposed to a lot of small businesses, both as a merchant and as the founder of ShopKeep POS, and in my experience, hard work alone just isn’t enough. Of all those retailers that have been forced to close their doors, only a tiny percentage did so because of a lack of effort. The real danger to small business isn’t putting in enough hours behind the counter, it’s putting in too many.

The key to sustainable success lies in the 1 percent inspiration. And by inspiration, I don’t mean the sitting in a bubble-bath, screaming a Eureka moment favored by inventors and scientists; I mean the ability of an entrepreneur to make enough time every day to immerse themselves in the details of their business and make smart, insightful decisions. Not every moment is going to turn out to be game changing, but enough intelligent and thoughtful decisions in a row tend to equal a successful enterprise.

Lucky for us, there are a number of affordable, cloud-based programs available that can really help make day-to-day processes more efficient, give you more time, more information and generally get you closer to making smarter business decisions. I’m a strong believer in cloud-based applications and we use them everyday here at ShopKeep POS. I’ve listed a few of my favorites below.

WhenToWork makes it easy to schedule shifts, see when employees are working and fill empty slots with those who have availability. It keeps all employees in touch, so it makes the whole process much smoother. No more forgetting who’s supposed to open tomorrow.

For small business owners, that nightmare of you falling from a high cliff is often replaced by a tower of paper tumbling onto you, waking you up right as you are about to be buried. Use Bill.com for payables management and get some sleep. You and your accountant will have everything you need to manage day-to-day finances and cash flow.

I would also highly recommend FreshBooks which offers the ability to create and manage invoices, estimates, expenses and projects all in one place. It’s a really useful and easy to use tool for keeping the financial side of your business in good order. They also provide really great customer support which is something that is really close to my heart.

One thing small business owners sometimes miss out on are those amazing phone systems favored by larger corporations where everyone has the same prefix, and it’s easy to access the phone number of any employee. Ring Central offers an inexpensive cloud-based phone system that does what those legacy systems do, but even better. It also works with mobile phones.

For brick and mortar retailers looking to find a powerful point of sale system that doesn’t break the bank, it is now possible to get set up with a full-service POS system that includes an iPad register and stores data in the cloud. ShopKeep POS is designed to empower small businesses by giving them tools like advanced data analysis and new technologies like mobile payments that they historically have never been able to access.

There are an incredible number of resources available to the small business community to help them reduce stress, find more time and generally be smarter about how they channel their business efforts. Additionally, a lot of these services are able to integrate with one another — which can save you even more time.

Even with all the right support, It’s still a long, hard road to business success. That’s why ShopKeep POS has joined Open Sky in sponsoring The Small Business Breakthrough, a national movement to celebrate, recognize and promote small businesses and entrepreneurs in the United States. If you’re reading this and you want to support your favorite local business, you can nominate them for a Breakthrough Award on bigstagebigresults.com and then share the nomination via social media using the hashtag #sbbreakthru.

When David Steingard began researching point-of-sale systems to use at Laughing Man, the New York City coffee shop he founded with the actor Hugh Jackman in 2011, he was surprised at how expensive checkout terminals had become. Rather than paying $15,000 to $30,000 for a traditional POS system, Steingard opted to go with ShopKeep, a mobile system that runs on the iPad. Steingard says cloud-based POS systems are cheaper, faster, and easier than traditional checkout terminals, and ShopKeep in particular offers a number of reporting and inventory control tools that competing products don’t provide.

What makes Laughing Man different from other coffee shops?
What makes Laughing Man different is that we’re part of a business model where we incubate companies that can be successful on their own and are half-owned by Laughing Man Worldwide, which is our philanthropic end. One hundred-percent of profits from Laughing Man Worldwide go back into incubating new companies, giving to education, and giving to other programs abroad. So, we’re part of a new social business model. At the same time, we have amazing coffee that can compete with any of the other specialty coffee shops.

Where did your interest in using ShopKeep as your point-of-sale system come from?
Just an Internet search on various POS systems. We have a very small space, so we needed something that was as minimal as possible. We needed something that obviously was affordable, but had enough robust inventory features. It really came down to — there was ShopKeep, there was Square, and there were a couple of other things. But ShopKeep was the only one that fit this great niche of having enough reporting and inventory control, and a really good interface for a shop that wasn’t just scanning on an iPhone. Square just didn’t have enough of the robust features we needed, so that’s how we ended up going with [ShopKeep].

How do you use the inventory control features at Laughing Man?
There’s a back office that you get into through your portal on the Internet for adding inventory, pricing, tracking inventory, and [generating] reports on sales and the percentages of sales. It’s just a very easy interface. Then, when you go to use the iPad app, it’s all loaded up there and ready to go. The functioning between the printer receipt and the cash drawer and the iPad is fantastic. The cash drawer is wireless, so you just hit [the button] and it opens. I’ve even taken this thing to conferences and other one-off events, and it worked immediately. It’s portable. That’s the kind of thing people would use Square for, but I’ve found [ShopKeep] just as effective. Additionally, I love the company. I only know David [Olk, co-founder of ShopKeep] because he randomly came into the shop and I found out who he was. But the customer service is great. When you call them, they pick up and answer.

What is the benefit of going cloud-based in your POS system, versus traditional POS systems?
It’s cheaper. Your traditional POS system will cost $15,000 or $30,000, and that’s why it’s a bizarre thing. There’s Square, there’s ShopKeep, there’s a couple of other things, and then it jumps to full-on terminals that you run supermarkets on. So certainly in the cloud I don’t need a server; I don’t need anything. The major advantage to using the cloud with anything is usually going to be the cost structure of it.

How do the costs work with ShopKeep?
You pay a monthly fee and then you pay your transactions through your merchant account, which they have nothing to do with. I think they work with more [merchant accounts] now than they did, but you can work with anybody.

Are there any particular features with ShopKeep that make it especially useful for you and your staff?
For us what’s nice is you can categorize items. What that means is, when you go to the iPad, you can swipe through the screens. So let’s say I have all my coffee drinks, then I also sell packaged coffee. I can swipe the [coffee drinks] screen and then I can get to all the packaged coffee. I can then swipe and I get all the [coffee brewing] gear. It allows you to very clearly identify the sections of things you’re going to sell, and then obviously find the item within that, instead of just a big, long list that you’ve got to run down. I just think the application is also just beautifully designed, as far as the interface. It’s very easy to use and easy to adjust on the back end. I think that’s something user-friendly-wise that’s really good.

What makes the iPad superior to the iPhone or other handheld devices when it comes to processing in-store transactions?
To me, it’s faster. I’ve never used the iPhone for a POS, but the iPad is just the right size screen. I can have multiple buttons on there; it’s clear; I don’t have to squint; I don’t have to hold it. It’s just much more user-friendly and faster, from my experience in a shop. It can stand there; you can push a button. Although the iPhone is smaller, I would think it would be a bit more cumbersome to find the and push the right button. For travel, maybe it’s good. But like I said, I’ve traveled with this and used it as a POS, and it works phenomenally. So I think it’s a matter of if you have a tiny book, or if you have a book that’s a little easier to read.

Do customers know you’re using anything other than a traditional POS system? Do they interact with the ShopKeep app in any way?
There’s a swiper on the side [of the iPad], and a few people a day are like, “Oh, that’s so cool. What is that?” Some people mention Square and things like that, but everybody is intrigued by just how elegant and simple it is. You would think they would know that there must be something like this out there, but they’re all blown away that the iPad can work as such a good POS system.

Do you use any of the CRM tools that ShopKeep offers for marketing?
We haven’t explored that much, no. Right now we use MailChimp for our email outreach. But at this stage, the truth is we don’t do much of that anyway. We’ve only been open five months, and we haven’t really done a robust mailing or anything like that. So we haven’t really used many of those features.