Overall Rating

This is a FreePos all-in-one card reader and mobile/tablet EPOS app. It offers a low fee of 1.69% per transaction, with no monthly fee. The EPOS software which comes with the payment processing is free. 

Like other FreePOS solutions, Sum Up will negotiate a lower fee when you reach a certain size.  

The SumUp Air reader is one of the leading mobile card readers too, next to iZettle – and there isn’t a lot between them. The reader works in conjunction with the SumUp app on your smartphone or iPad. 

If this interests you, ring us on 020 3874 1470 or email hello@storekit.com and ask to schedule a chat with us. Tell us you’re thinking of going for SumUp. We’ll ask you two or three quick questions about your business – that will let us double check it fits what you’re looking for, and can integrate with any software you already have. 

Get set up today by going through our guide, where we “Sum Up” all the details you need. 

What is SumUp?

SumUp is part of a new generation of EPOS and payment solutions – it does both your EPOS software and your payment processing (although, like many bigger stores, you could use SumUp only for payment processing, and opt to use another EPOS system). It has fewer options than you would get with the software that you pay for, but it does a good job of taking cash and card payments. 

Who is SumUp for?

SumUp is a good choice for small businesses and sole traders. Businesses with card revenues of  8-10k per month or less and low volume. For example, if you’re an independent hairdresser and you charge £40 for a haircut, SumUp will only charge you 88p for the transaction. There are no other hidden costs and no minimum sales volume required. 

SumUp contract and costs 

There’s no contract or rental fee with the terminal. When you stop processing on your reader, you stop paying altogether. The fee is 1.69% per transaction, on any card. The app is free to download. You can sign up online in 5 minutes. The standard reader costs £29 (including free delivery) when you download your software through StoreKit. SumUp pays your money NET: the commission fee is taken before the money enters your account, so there is no need for a direct debit. The remittance to your account takes 1-3 working days. SumUp also offer a POS register; including a tablet, cash drawer, receipt printer, and SumUp Air in one neat bundle. But you’ll find it works out cheaper if you go through StoreKit! 

The Nitty & Gritty

• Can I operate Sum Up out of a laptop?

No. It has to be done via a mobile or tablet. 

• How strong is the software?

Sum Up software is basic compared to iZettle, but the payments are (slightly) cheaper. 

• How does the reader take payments? 

You need to pair your reader and your device (like your smartphone) via a bluetooth connection. 

• How can customers pay?

The reader accepts many forms of payment, including: contactless, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Chip & PIN, or Magnetic Stripe (swipe). It’s one of the only card readers to accept all card payment entry methods. 

• Accepts American Express, Maestro, Visa, MasterCard (iZettle accepts more card types than SumUp, such as foreign cards).
• Minimum card payment of £1 through the Sum Up card reader. 
• At 84 x 84 x 23 mm, it’s smaller than both the PayPal Here and iZettle devices, but even if it’s just sitting loose, it feels fairly weighty and isn’t flimsy.

• How do I print receipts?

It can’t print receipts, but you can purchase a bluetooth printer through our website. You can also send receipts via email or text message.

• Refunds are free if done straight after the transaction took place, i.e. before settlement has completed. However, if payments have already been paid out to your bank account, SumUp keeps the transaction fee for the refund. Chargebacks incur a £10 admin fee.
• No buttons?

Unlike PayPal Here and iZettle, the SumUp reader doesn’t use buttons – it has a touch screen a bit like a mobile phone screen. 

Setting up and using SumUp

1. Set up with StoreKit – we can get you started on a complete POS solution, with all the right hardware configured. Give us a call to get help on choosing the right equipment! Make sure you’ve got the hardware. You’ll need a phone or tablet to download the app. You’ll also need a SumUp card reader. 

There are two on the market – the latest one, SumUp 3G, comes in at £99. It has an inbuilt Sim card and allows you to take payments even without WiFi connection. Unlike some other card readers, the SumUp reader does not print receipts, so you may also need to buy a receipt printer. 

Anything else is extra: barcode scanner, barcode printer, cash drawer, or a kitchen printer if you send food tickets to chefs, and maybe a stand for your tablet. All can be bought from our website, but are not essential for taking payments and registering transactions. 

2. Search SumUp app on your Apple or Android device. Download the app onto your phone or tablet. You’ll need to enter some personal information including your name,  home and business address, the legal structure of your company and your bank account details. There are some restrictions around the businesses which can use SumUp – for example, if you’re high risk. 

Using the app for your EPOS 

After a quick sign up, it’s easy to start using the SumUp app to sell things. You can view the buttons which represent different products, and when you take the goods to the basket, it will cue the price of the basket on the card reader, ready for the customer to pay.

There are: categories (e.g “Cakes”), products (e.g “Bakewell Tart”) and variables (e.g “normal/ large”). 

After you’ve paired your card reader to your account, simply tap the product that the customer selects and the price will display on the reader. Then, when they tap their card against it – voila! It’s easy enough to manually add items in this view – you can toggle an “edit” mode and input the name, product variants, add images and more. If you’re adding multiple items to your product library, it’s much easier and quicker to upload an Excel file. 

You can’t manually add special payment types like vouchers, gift cards or accept split payments. Also a big downer is – there’s no ability to add tips, which is not ideal if you’re in hospitality. There’s no in-app invoicing. 

Once you’ve queued up a transaction on the app, ask your customer to plug in their credit card or debit card and follow the instructions on the screen.

Send receipts 

After processing a successful transaction, you’ll get a pop up asking to send a receipt via email or text. Just add the email address or mobile phone number of your customer and hit the “Send Receipt” button.

Resend receipts 

To resend a receipt, first go to your list of transactions (that’s the button second from the left, on the bottom of your screen), and tap the transaction you’re dealing with. Then tap the three little dots in the right corner of the transaction field and choose “Send receipt”. You can then add email address or mobile number and send a receipt.

Sum Up back-office

You can log in to an online dashboard accessible in any internet browser. Go to sumup.me. Here, you see details like total sales revenue, sales performance, payment history, sales categorised into card types, and payouts.

SumUp emails you payout PDF reports automatically every month. 

This is the overview. It’s designed to give you a snapshot of your business. You can see it shows you how much you’re selling over time, and whether your card sales are growing month on month. So it gives a cursory look at some top stats – including whether you have people returning with the same cards. Again, this has downsides. Even though you can export transaction data as a CSV or XLS file from your SumUp dashboard, the reporting is not as mature as iZettle. With iZettle, you can connect your EPOS with any existing bookkeeping software you use, like Xero, to help with accounts. 

Sales

There are two tabs here – transactions and payouts. The transactions page is a big one – it gives you a list of all the transactions you’ve made within a customisable time frame, and you can search for a specific transaction using the search bar and entering the transaction ID. The map feature also tells you the location of where that transaction was processed. 

If you have several employees registered in your SumUp account, you can filter your transactions by employees by clicking on “Employee” and entering the login details for that employee. Confirm your choice by clicking on “Apply”.

Reports 

You access these reports by going through the “Transactions” section in Sales. Click on the “My Reports” button in the top right (then select the report you wish to download as a pdf). 

1. The sales report – all your sales activity over a set period of time. Of which product, how many you sold, and what tax category they fall under. 
2. The payout report is a list of all the card transactions that have already been paid out to you – including the date of the payout and the associated transaction fees. 
3. Monthly transaction fees invoice – what you’ve already paid to SumUp (deducted from your payouts)
4. Transaction report – all your transactions, including card payments, cash payments, and refunds. You can view the payment method, the status of a transaction, the customer’s card details and a transaction description if it was added.
5. Revenue report – this provides you with a full overview of all the goods or services you’ve sold over a set period (sorted by category, payment method, and employees).

Products

In the product section, you can add a new category or a new product, and edit existing products or variants. 

E-commerce – it’s new!

In February of 2019, SumUp acquired Shoplo, a multichannel eCommerce platform. Through Shoplo, you can integrate your SumUp account with eCommerce marketplaces, such as eBay and Etsy. This API lets you manage your eCommerce directly from the SumUp app.

Integrations 

There’s no table management built into the SumUp app – but you can integrate with iKentoo, which is an iPad POS and management solution for restaurants and hospitality businesses. If you want to keep Sumup as your payments provider, you can use a few different softwares which SumUp are partnered with: ikentoo, talech, kounta, the Good Till, Gastrofix. 

iZettle have the upper hand here, as it’s the most widely-integrated payment option on the shelf. 

TLDR: SumUp is great for the budget-conscious merchant who doesn’t need all the fancy extras and integrations that iZettle or other paid solutions can provide. 

Fees/pricing 

SumUp customers pay around 1.69% fee for all debit and credit card types. BUT if you’re a bigger merchant, turning over £6k a month, you’re in a position to negotiate with SumUp and get a better deal than the headline rate. 

The only time that this standard processing fee alters is when you’re processing a payment via the virtual terminal fee. This is used when you’ve got a customer who wants to pay with a credit card but are not physically present to make the payment (and instead use phone, email or app). This is charged at 2.95% + £0.25.

With iZettle, you always pay a flat payment processing fee of 1.75% (but can negotiate too!). Give us a call or email hello@storekit.com if you need clarification on this process. We’ll advise you on the cheapest payment provider by doing some maths (which it’s difficult to do yourself) – for example, we’ll estimate the rate you would be able to negotiate in interchange + + format based on your transaction size, volume, and foreign card intake – and work out whether it’s cheaper.

SumUp initially comes up cheaper in regards to overall running costs so is the best bet if you’re consciously aiming to keep costs low, but there are limits and you might find iZettle does more for the money.  

Protections 

You’re not tied into a fixed contract. If you want to cease your relationship with SumUp, you simply stop processing through them.

There are a bunch of thorough online guides on the SumUp website if you need help setting up. 

Otherwise, you can ring up their support centre during office hours: Monday-Friday between 8 AM and 7 PM or, on Saturday and Sunday between 8 AM and 5 PM. Unlike iZettle, SumUp don’t charge you a premium for Saturday/Sunday phone support. 

Warranty – the Sum Up warranty protects you for twelve months from the date of purchase, except if the SIM has been remove or it looks like it’s been used “improperly”. 

Closest competitors 

Competitor Cheat Sheet

Here’s our cheat sheet:

			Card processing
	Price – starts at	Price – goes as low as	Speed – when will the money be in my account?	Our software assessment	Integrations with better software
SumUp	1.69%	1.69%	Weekly deposits with a 2-3 day lag	Very basic	Quite a few
Square	1.75%	1%	36 hours	Basic	Some
iZettle	1.75%	1%	2-3 business days	Basic	Loads
PayPal Here	2.75%	1%	Instantly available via PayPal	Very basic	Some

Payments

These two-in-one solutions all work in the same way when it comes to payments. SumUp has a fixed rate of around 1.69%, includes basic EPOS (or you can choose to integrate high-end EPOS) and it comes with a unique card reader. The competitor cheat-sheet here only shows two-in-one solutions. 

If you’re not sure whether a two-in-one solution is right for you, book a call and we can talk you through why you might want one. Tell us you’re thinking of going for a “payment facilitator” and you want to know whether it’s the cheapest option. The other option is called an acquirer.

• Acquirers (Worldpay & others) 

Upsides: can be cheaper in some circumstances (high processing volumes, high average transaction size, few foreign cards).

Downsides: acquirers are much more expensive on the flipside (lower volumes, lower average transaction size, lots of foreign cards). Plus, there’s a contract involved – usually a couple of years – and they take about a week to set up. 

Two competitors are head and shoulders above the others here – Square and iZettle have superior software to Sum Up and PayPal Here. That’s based on the level of functionality and the ease of use. PayPal is the most expensive and the least usable – so we’ll take you through SumUp and Square.

• Square

Upsides: looks great, and the EPOS is pretty good 

Downsides: doesn’t accept Chinese or Japanese cards, and fewer integrations with better EPOS software. 

• SumUp

Upsides: it starts at the cheapest rate, can be used abroad

Downsides: very basic EPOS, and becomes uncompetitive pretty quickly as you grow. 

Quick Hardware Guide

To set up your complete SumUp EPOS system, you need:

An Android or Apple device

By device, we basically mean hardware which can download an app. That’s an iPad, iPhone, Android Tablet, or Android Phone. That means Windows and Huawei phones are not supported. 

(Not sure what your device is? Samsung, Nokia, LG, and Moto tend to use Android – but you can double check by looking for “Google Play Store” in your apps. If it’s there, you use Android.) 

For this, we sell iPads. We price-match with Apple on these. But remember, if you’re a market stand, you want to choose an iPad which supports a SIM. That means it will have internet available – which the payment processing requires to work. 

A Card Reader

SumUp requires its own reader – see above for your two options.

A Receipt Printer

You’ll need to buy your own one, as SumUp readers don’t have in-built receipt printers.

You have four choices:

USB Apple/Android – Remember, the difference is more than just cables – they will not work with the wrong operating system.

USBs are generally the cheapest and most restrictive kind of receipt printer. It needs to be plugged in to the tablet, meaning that both your tablet and your printer are stuck where they are – so it’s a good choice if you have fixed tills. You can find a USB receipt printer for Apple tablet here and for Android here. You’ll need an extra OTG adapter for android. Browse

Ethernet – this one works via the internet. The printer needs to be plugged into your WiFi router (via an ethernet cable, included), but you can take the iPad wherever you like – for example, to a table in your restaurant. You can also attach multiple printers to one device with these – so you can print a little here, print a little there – and see how you go. Browse

Bluetooth – this is wireless as far as the connection goes, but it still needs plugging into the wall. If you have a market stand, and you don’t have a router but a SIM, this is the printer you need. It’s the most expensive of the three. It’s also one device per printer, and vice versa. Browse

You also need to get thermal paper till rolls which are very cheap.

A Cash Drawer

These are pretty fungible and do what they say on the tin. Cash draws come with OTG cables which plug in to any receipt printer if you want them to open automatically when someone makes a purchase. 

A Tablet Stand

We have funky stands for tablets of all shapes and sizes. We’re the only UK stocking for some of these bad boys. 

Kitchen Printers 

These are for when you have a kitchen, and you want to send tickets to it. Now, you can use (cheaper) receipt printers for this, but they use something called “thermal paper” which blackens when it gets hot. Kitchen Printers use ink and normal paper, are designed for hot environments, and to be heard among the kitchen din. 

Barcode scanners 

1D is fine for barcodes, 2D is what you need for fancy stuff like QR codes. 

Whole Kits

If you’re worried you’ll get mismatching items, you can build a kit here.