Age Restricted Items and Driver’s License Scanning

There are many products you may be selling that should only be bought by those of a certain age. This is particularly important to vape shops. Often, by state law, failing to control who you’re selling either tobacco or vape supplies to could result in fines or loss of your business license.

Some states will even perform sting operations, which can result in great legal difficulties.

ThunderPOS gives you tools to help avoid these problems. These tools also can be used to make entering a customer simpler. Let us show you how to keep your vape supplies or other age restricted items secure from underaged purchasers.

Above, you can see the customer entry screen. However, the only thing that has been typed into this screen is the customer ID. Everything else was done with a license scanner. For this, all you need to do with your compatible scanner is hit ‘scan license’. Then, scan the barcode on the back of the customer’s government-issued id.

You get a lot of information off of this scan. Exact details can vary from state to state, as not all fields are on all ids. However, the most important one for this feature is on every state’s ID: the customer’s date of birth. This being brought in from the barcode protects you from the customer having manually tweaked the human readable information on the license.

Now, when setting up your items, you will need to set them to check the customer’s age. This is done in the lower left section of the item screen, by checking the box for ‘Enforce Minimum Age of” and filling in that age. In the above example, it’s been set for 18, which is a very common age for item restrictions. However, this can be whatever you need it to be, whether that’s 13 for a PG-13 movie or 21 for alcohol.

When you try to sell this item now, one of two things will happen. If you’ve got a customer selected, the system checks for if they are old enough to buy the product. Being underaged makes an alert pop up for the cashier.

If you don’t have a customer selected, or the customer has no date of birth, you will see this:

The exact date in this prompt will of course change based on the required age for purchase, as well as the current date. This prompt allows you to still force the cashier to acknowledge doing a check, even if you’re not doing license scanning. This helps prevent inaction leading to legal problems for your store.

One last thing on this topic: License scanning can also be used to easily select existing customers who were set up using it. This is true even if you don’t know their customer id, without having to do a manual search.

You’ll just need to add the “scan license” button to your register design if it doesn’t already have it.

Once this is in place, clicking it will bring up a prompt for you to scan the license, like so:

Do that, and if the customer is found with that driver’s license id, it will select them for the invoice. If they aren’t found, it will offer you the option to create the customer using that scan data, so this can also be a shortcut straight to the customer creation screen.