Mobile Point of Sale Checkout Going Direct To Consumer.

Customer satisfaction. The holy grail of commerce whether it be an e-commerce shopping cart site, a brick and mortar store with cash registers or the latest m-commerce mobile point of sale with a mobile payment gateway. We’ve all been there before, you go into a store, make a few selections, and then the lines. Those long lines at the cash register are a retailers nightmare. So bad in fact, that retailers probably have no idea how many transactions are aborted due to heavy waits in a cashier lane.

MPOS or Mobile Point of Sale is the new technology that makes long waits in line a thing of the past. Online retailers with e-commerce payment gateways have given shoppers a sense of entitlement by removing the wait barrier. Now these consumers are seeing waits in cash register lines magnify as they become familiar with the more instant shopping cart and payment gateway process involved in shopping an online e-commerce site. Today the lines are blurring between an e-commerce website online and a mobile point of sale application capable of relaying inventory levels, product details and completing an order from selection to payment processing.

Square, PayPal and others have flocked to mobile point of sale users offering software that can run on a PC, a laptop, a smartphone or tablet. The incentive is capturing payment gateway transactions turning point of sale applications into a commodity. Several open source and free mobile point of sale applications already exist and there should be more activity in this field as transactions and amounts heat up. There are high expectations for point of sale transaction processing gateways and many merchant account service providers are going for any advantage they can procure. Merchants are now in the position of upgrading their traditional cash register based point of sale systems which were expensive and carried high credit card processing rates, with newer, more advanced mobile point of sale hardware and software that has far lower cost for entry. VARs are even leveraging the adoption costs by financing up-front costs in a Sales as a Service (SaaS). Sales as a Service bundles the costs of tablets, receipt printers and cash drawers as well as security and credit card processing fees into a single monthly fee.