IT support for shops and retailers
Managed IT for independent shops, small chains and hospitality across London and Essex. When the till stops, the queue does not — so the systems behind the counter get looked after before Saturday, not during it.
What we usually find in a shop
Retail IT is unforgiving in a way office IT is not. There is no workaround for a broken till and no rescheduling a Saturday afternoon.
- Everything depends on one connection. Card payments, the EPOS system, stock and the guest Wi-Fi usually share a single broadband line with no fallback. When it drops, you are taking cash or taking nothing.
- Card data is not optional to protect. PCI DSS is a contractual requirement from your payment processor, not a suggestion. The current standard expects real controls rather than a checklist once a year.
- The customer Wi-Fi and the till are on the same network. It is the most common thing we find, and it means a guest device sits alongside the machine that takes payments.
- Back-office kit is forgotten. The stock computer, the CCTV recorder and the machine that prints labels are rarely patched and often still on a password someone set years ago.
- Staff turnover is high. Shared logins on the till and on email, and access that stays live long after someone has left.
- Trading peaks are the worst time to discover anything. Christmas, sale weekends and school holidays are when the equipment is under the most load and the least attention.
What we look after
Day to day
- The computers, networks and connections your EPOS and card terminals depend on. We do not support the EPOS software or the payment terminal itself — those stay with your provider — but everything they run on is ours
- Shop broadband with a mobile fallback, so a cut line does not close the till
- Back-office computers, printers, label and receipt hardware, scanners and stock machines
- Wi-Fi that covers the shop floor and the stock room, with customers kept on a separate network from the till
- Microsoft 365 email and files for the office, and accounts closed the day someone leaves
- More than one site kept working the same way, rather than each shop doing its own thing
Where the risk sits
- Payment and till equipment separated from guest and general use networks
- Multi-factor authentication on email, admin and anything reachable from outside the shop
- Individual logins for staff, so the till log means something when stock or cash goes missing
- Router, CCTV and back-office kit taken off default passwords and kept updated
- Backups of stock, sales and business records, kept apart from the shop and tested by restoring them
- The technical groundwork for PCI DSS, set up so your annual questionnaire describes something that is actually true
Worth saying plainly
We are an IT provider. We are not a payment processor, not a PCI assessor and not your EPOS vendor, and we will not claim that hiring us makes you compliant. Your merchant agreement and your self-assessment questionnaire stay yours.
What we do is build and maintain the technical side underneath: segregated networks, controlled access, updated equipment and evidence that it is real. If your acquirer asks questions after an incident, that should not be the moment you find out how the shop network was put together.
Start before the next busy weekend
Our free IT health check reviews your shop setup and returns a written summary — what is solid, what is exposed, and what would stop you trading. No obligation afterwards.
Managed support starts at £45 per user per month where everything is in the cloud, or £60 per user where you run your own server, with a minimum of £300 per month. A single small shop is often better served by pay-as-you-go remote support, and we will say so rather than sell you a contract. Our prices are published either way.