The Helcim Merchant Newsletter February 2023

Curious what Helcim's been up to? Read this.

This blog is part of our quarterly merchant newsletter series, written by Nic Beique, Founder and CEO of Helcim, intended to bring greater visibility and transparency about what is really happening at Helcim. If you haven't read our first post, which goes into the "why" behind this series, you can find it here.

So, let’s get started with the top things currently on our minds:

New this quarter: Smart Terminal, platform updates, and new features.

First, I want to say thank you so much for all of the emails and replies that came in from our first quarterly newsletter in November. I had hundreds of merchants reach out with kind words, ideas, as well as some deserved pointed feedback on how to improve our service. Thank you! The goal of this newsletter was to be able to have a candid dialogue with our merchants so that we can make our service as amazing as you and your business deserve.

What is the Smart Terminal?

The Helcim Smart Terminal, which will be launching this Spring 2023, is a stand-alone device powered by Android. It only requires a WiFi connection, has a built-in receipt printer, and supports a long battery life. It is the perfect countertop companion for accepting Tap, Chip, PIN and Debit transactions, and gives you access to the Helcim platform from a beautiful full-color touch-screen. You can learn more about it here.

Platform infrastructure and outage alerts

In our first merchant newsletter, I shared that we had made huge investments in 2022 in our infrastructure to keep up with the fast growth of our service. This included a complete migration of our platform to the cloud and big investments into our technology teams.

When writing an early draft of this newsletter, I was excited to celebrate the lack of outages since November and the drastic improvements to both the speed and stability of our platform. Unfortunately, I celebrated too quickly. On Thursday, February 2nd, we experienced a significant slowdown with our platform that caused some of our merchants to be without service for over 90-minutes. First, I sincerely apologize. We take the uptime of our service extremely seriously and our team works tirelessly to try and avoid something like this from occurring.

We’ve since identified what configurations caused the issue, and have put better controls in place to mitigate them in the future. We can’t promise that we won’t experience issues from time to time, but I can say that our confidence in the stability of our platform continues to improve with every week that we learn and scale.

We also know that you deserve better visibility when an outage occurs, so we’ve created a status page. This portal is hosted by a third-party, meaning that it will be available even if our own website is experiencing issues. You can also subscribe using your email address and be kept up to speed with real-time updates if an outage occurs and when it is resolved.

Feature updates

The team and I are excited to share some new updates to our merchant platform:

🟢 Improvements to Payment apps stability

We refactored (meaning we built new and better code from scratch) our Android, Windows and MacOS applications. The new Android code has been rolled out and we’ve seen a significant improvement in connectivity. The new Windows and MacOS codes are being rolled out in the coming weeks, and the iOS refactoring is currently underway.

🟢 HelcimPay.js

Our merchants have been asking us for an easier way for developers to integrate Helcim payments into their website and apps, so we got busy. We’re proud to announce the official launch of HelcimPay.js!

🟢 New UIs for transactions and card batches

You will soon notice new interfaces in the “Payments” section to make it easier to navigate and view your transaction history. A big thank you to all our merchants that participated in the beta. The update will begin rolling out to all accounts shortly and we’re excited to share this improved functionality with you.

We have many more updates just around the corner that we will be excited to share with you in the Spring, including updates to our QuickBook integrations and Invoicing tools. Stay tuned!

Celebrating small businesses

With so many headlines about the state of the economy and what it all means for our future, I thought I would share a message of optimism. That optimism comes from the many conversations I’ve been having with small business owners. So many of you, regardless of some potential bumps in the road, are confident in a bright future ahead - ultimately it is that mindset and tenacity that will make it happen.

Small businesses are the heartbeat of our economy - your passion for your business creates communities, employs more people and contributes more to our economy than all larger enterprises combined. You are what keeps the world running.

Thank you for what you do, and thank you for your continued trust in our team.

-Nic Helcim Founder & CEO

P.S. Know another business owner (maybe your accountant, dentist, or local mechanic) that you think would love Helcim? If so, send them an invite from your account dashboard - if they sign up both of you will get $5,000 in free processing as a thank you from us!