by Serguey Shinder
For most of our gigs the merch table is our bass player and a card reader that talks to an app on an old phone. In October 2024 we did a long weekend of three shows, Friday to Sunday, and all three venues were basements. There was no signal in any of them. The app has an offline mode for exactly this, so we switched it on, and over three nights we sold around sixty shirts, records and tote bags, almost all of them by card.
The app does not tell you, unless you go looking, that payments taken offline are only held on the phone until it next connects, and that if it does not connect within twenty four hours they expire and are never processed. Nobody had read that part. After the Friday show the phone went into the glovebox with the float, and it stayed there switched off, because it was the merch phone and nobody needed it until the next night's merch table, in the next basement.
On the Monday morning our bass player opened the app at home to see how we had done. Friday's takings had gone, and so had most of Saturday's. Of what remained, two cards were declined once they finally reached the bank, and when you take a payment offline, a decline is your loss rather than the bank's. We had sold a little over a thousand pounds of merch that weekend and received just under four hundred of it.
What hurt most was that the van had driven through towns with perfectly good signal on every one of those journeys. The money had been sitting a few minutes of mobile data away from safety the whole time, waiting for somebody to switch on a phone.
What changed was not technical, and it took two weeks to stick. When we load in, whoever is on merch asks the venue for its wifi before anything else, and writes it on the setlist. If there is none, the reader goes into offline mode with a per sale limit set low, so a single decline cannot cost much. And before the van leaves town each night, whoever is in the passenger seat switches the merch phone on, waits for signal, opens the app, and reads out the number of payments still pending. We do not leave until it says nought.
The same rule now covers the guest list tablet and the mailing list signups, which also used to live on devices nobody switched on until the next gig.
A sale only counts once the money has somewhere to land. Until then it is just a promise kept on a phone in the glovebox.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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