Biometrics Market To Reach $14.9 Billion by 2024
The Biometrics market currently sits at $2 billion, by 2024, it will reach $14.9 billion, with a cumulative total revenue of $67.8 billion. This is being driven by new advancements in Biometrics Hardware and Software that are not only transforming payments, but also serving as frictionless alternatives to security in a myriad of use cases.
For consumer facing security, Biometrics can be deployed at a low price-point for high-volume authentication. Think an iris scan or finger swipe for quickly unlocking a mobile device like an iPhone 6 or Samsung Galaxy S6.
The forecast goes over use cases that spans from Point-of-Sale transactions, to voter identification, making the case for Biometrics embedding itself into a vast number of aspects in everyday life.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale, Smartphone Tagged with: biometrics, consumer, device, mobile, mobile device, payments, point of sale, Security, swipe, transactions
January 15th, 2015 by Elma Jane
The fact that your business needs a mobile presence is by no means news. Brands today know that being accessible to the increasing number of smartphones and tablet users is a must NOW, the goal is to provide a top-notch user experience.
Mobile is opening the door for designing new experiences that complement a brand’s physical presence. The context of WHEN, WHERE and WHAT a customer is doing during their day allows companies to enhance a person’s interaction and customize device-specific experiences.
Brands will need to meet the following mobile experience expectations in 2015:
Combating fraud through mobile. Mobile users want to safeguard themselves against fraud, and 56 percent are willing to deal with a slightly more complex user experience if it means greater protection. Businesses can provide an intuitive, high-quality mobile experience that also protects against fraud by offering to validate transactions, set fraud controls and generate unique payment IDs through the user’s mobile device.
Complement, not copy: E-commerce providers must leverage mobile to complement the user experience, rather than provide a replica of what users get through a Web browser. Nearly 4 in 10 mobile users are most likely to use their mobile phone for shopping, so businesses need to ensure that those customers are getting something unique from their mobile interaction.
CRM through mobile marketing: Mobile marketing isn’t just for acquisition anymore. Today, it’s about boosting loyalty by using mobile for customer, consumers always have their mobile device on them and check it more than 150 times a day. Businesses can communicate with their existing customers through alert notifications, in-app, email and mobile Web. But don’t overdo it. The key to maintaining an effective relationship is doing so in a complementary way, giving users what they need when they need it.
Mobile apps and mobile Web: Got a mobile app but not a mobile-friendly website, or vice versa? You might want to put your energy into leveling out your mobile presence. Consumers are about equally split when it comes to their preference of app versus browser: The percentage of users who prefer their mobile browser when completing a task 28 percent is only slightly higher than the 23 percent that prefer to use an app. Both app and Web designs are critical for businesses in the mobile space, so it pays to do them right.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Smartphone Tagged with: consumers, crm, customers, e-commerce, mobile, mobile device, payment, provider's, Smartphones, transactions
December 1st, 2014 by Elma Jane
Few Americans will likely remember the life and work of Martin Cooper, largely because most Americans have no idea who Martin Cooper is. Without Martin Cooper much of what we identify as normal life for the last two decades would not have been possible, as without his invention we would still be looking for pay phones, dropping off film to be developed, printing out boarding passes and contemplating a future where a plastic rectangle was the height of payments technology.
Anyone reading this has a phone with internet access which means no one has to guess, with a few taps on a smartphone most readers who didn’t already know were able to find out that Martin Cooper invented the handheld mobile phone and by so doing changed the lives of not just Americans, but people all over the world.
Mobile has integrated so seamlessly into our life that we didn’t realize it was changing everything we do.
Here are the list of all of the ways that mobile has improved life for us all.
We All Get To Know Everything All The Time, with just a smartphone. Impulse buy is a thing of the past because consumers just don’t buy on impulse as much anymore. A new intentionality has taken hold of shopping. Many Americans have the money and the will to spend. But they are time-pressed and deal savvy, visiting stores only when they run out of items like cereal or toilet paper and after doing extensive research on purchases online and with friends. They buy what they came for and then leave. Plus consumers are harder to fool, they know if they are being overcharged because they can look it up in real time while they are in the showroom.
Full Price Is A Notion Utterly Without Meaning. There are sites like Groupon, LivingSocial and a thousand imitators offer coupons pretty much across every retailer that mean no matter where one is shopping or eating they’re probably a few button taps away from paying less for the type of service they are out for. And then there are the retailer rewards programs all bent on giving consumers more stuff for free as long as they use their mobile coupons.
We All Think Way More About Privacy And Digital Security Than We Used To. Twenty years ago one’s largest security concern was probably that their home or car would be broken into, followed closely by their wallet being stolen. Now we wait for Russian cybercriminals to steal our cards by hacking into POS systems and lifting the data. Or for cybercriminals to hack our phones and upload naked pictures of us to the internet (celebrity readers only). Or for Nigerian princes to trick our grandparents into wiring them money. In short, while we still fear for our physical possessions as much as we ever did, the mobile world gave us something entirely new to worry about, the integrity of our data and who could use our phones, cards and email accounts as a backdoor into our entire personal and financial lives.
We Want It All, And We Want It Now. Anyone with a phone in their pocket can, in one way or another, buy it on the spot. Which has given rise to the push for same-day delivery, consumers who can buy it now, also want to be able to get it now, or as close to now as possible.
We Also Want It Later. Maybe the consumer likes going to the store, enjoys the Christmas lights, wants to eat at a mall food court, they just don’t want to stand inline. And now, through the magic of omnichannel commerce, they may not have to do. Through the magic of multi-device shopping an instore pick-up, consumers are increasingly getting used to finding something on their mobile, paying on their computer and picking up in store. Or some combination thereof.
Mobile has made commerce less a race between the e-markets and the brick-and-mortars, and more a race to offer the most seamless commerce experience. Mobile has taught ever one to care less about where they buy, and more about what the total buying experience is.
We Pay For Access Instead Of Objects. Ten years ago when your family set about its early experiments in binge watching television with the first season of Lost, odds are everyone gathered round and watched a DVD set or maybe a Blue Ray, if your family happened to be full of early adopters.
This weekend, when entire families are sitting down to watch How To Get Away With Murder, more likely than not they are streaming it through Hulu. Unless they don’t want to watch that, in which case, they are watching something else on Netflix on their phone while sitting in the same room with their family. Unless of course this is a football family, in which case you are paying the NFL for access to every football game played everywhere in America tomorrow and a cable company to watch in HD.
We Want To Use A Phone To Access Everything. It’s almost now quaint to refer to a time when phones were used primarily to talk. With the rapidly emerging internet of things, it will soon be quaint to talk about a phone as a tool used primarily for communicating and shopping.
The smartphone is already heading toward being the key interface between connected devices and products (The Internet of Things) and their users. Among other things, people will use the device to remotely control household appliances, interact with screens and automatically adjust car settings to their preferences.
We Kinda Hope The Phone Might Keep Us Alive. With the release of Apple Pay, also came the release of Apple Health that has widely been reported as ushering in the age of mobile device as wellness guru. Smartphones can already help people lead healthier lives by providing information, recommendations and reminders based on data gathered through sensors embedded in users’ clothing (shoes, wristbands, etc.) or through other phone capabilities (motion detectors, cameras, etc.).
And, even if you don’t listen to your phone and put your health at risk, it will still probably save you. Internet-enabled mobile devices are becoming important tools in broadening access to health care, diagnosing diseases and saving lives in crisis situations.
Making Life A Lot Better For Everyone. Small merchants can do something now that they couldn’t do en masse twenty years ago. Take credit card payments and use a tablet to do that and run their business. With the emergence of mobile, came thousands of the other mPOS solutions and platforms exploding all over the world. This has not only changed the way these small businesses operate, it has changed their entire pitch to their customers.
Mobile has made life easier for many consumers, but for some businesses and many people mobile has made mainstream financial participation possible.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Smartphone Tagged with: (POS) systems, brick-and-mortars, cards, consumers, credit card payments, customers, data, e-markets, email accounts, mobile, mobile coupons, mobile device, mPOS solutions, omnichannel commerce, pay phones, payments technology, platforms, Small merchants, smartphone, tablet
October 8th, 2014 by Elma Jane
When the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) launched PCI DSS v3.0 in January 2014, businesses were given one year to implement the updated global standard. Now that the deadline is fast approaching, interest is picking up in what v3.0 entails. On Jan. 1, 2015, version 3.0 of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) will reach year one of its three-year lifecycle.
Trustwave, a global data security firm, is on the frontlines of helping secure the networks of merchants and other businesses on the electronic payments value chain against data breaches. As an approved scanning vendor, Trustwave is used by businesses to achieve and validate PCI DSS compliance.
PCI DSS v3.0 is business as usual for the most part, except for a few changes from v2.0 that considers impactful for large swaths of merchants. The top three changes involve e-commerce businesses that redirect consumers to third-party payment providers. The expansion of penetration testing requirements and the data security responsibilities of third-party service providers.
Penetration testing
Penetration testing is the way in which merchants can assess the security of their networks by pretending to be hackers and probing networks for weaknesses. V3.0 of the PCI DSS mandates that merchants follow a formal methodology in conducting penetration tests, and that the methodology goes well beyond what merchants can accomplish using off-the-shelf penetration testing software solutions.
Merchants that are self assessing and using such software are going to be surprised by the rigorous new methodology they are now expected to follow.
Additionally, penetration testing requirements in v3.0 raises the compliance bar for small merchants who self assess. Those merchants could lower the scope of their compliance responsibilities by segmenting their networks, which essentially walls off data-sensitive areas of networks from the larger network. In this way merchants could reduce their compliance burdens and not have to undergo penetration testing.
Not so in v3.0. If you do something to try to reduce the scope of the PCI DSS to your systems, you now need to perform a penetration test to prove that those boundaries are in fact rigid.
Redirecting merchants
The new redirect mandate as affecting some, but not all, e-commerce merchants that redirect customers, typically when they are ready to pay for online purchases to a third party to collect payment details. If you are a customer and you are going to a website and you add something to your shopping cart, when it comes time to enter in your credit card, this redirect says I’m going to send you off to this third party.
The redirect can come in several forms. It can be a direct link from the e-commerce merchant’s website to another website, such as in a PayPal Inc. scenario, or it can be done more silently.
An example of the silent method is the use of an iframe, HTML code used to display one website within another website. Real Estate on the merchant’s website is used by the third-party in such a way that consumers don’t even know that the payment details they input are being collected and processed, not by the e-commerce site, but by the third party.
Another redirect strategy is accomplished via pop-up windows for the collection of payments in such environments as online or mobile games. In-game pop-up windows are typically used to get gamers to pay a little money to purchase an enhancement to their gaming avatars or advance to the next level of game activity.
For merchants that employ these types of redirect strategies, PCI DSS v3.0 makes compliance much more complicated. In v2.0, such merchants that opted to take Self Assessment Questionnaires (SAQs), in lieu of undergoing on-site data security assessments, had to fill out the shortest of the eight SAQs. But in v3.0, such redirect merchants have to take the second longest SAQ, which entails over 100 security controls.
The PCI SSC made this change because of the steady uptick in the number and severity of e-commerce breaches, with hackers zeroing in on exploiting weaknesses in redirect strategies to steal cardholder data. Also, redirecting merchants may be putting themselves into greater data breach jeopardy when they believe that third-party payment providers on the receiving end of redirects are reducing merchants’ compliance responsibilities, when that may not, in fact, be the case.
Service providers
Service provider is any entity that stores, processes or transmits payment card data. Examples include gateways, web hosting companies, back-up facilities and call centers. The update to the standard directs service providers to clearly articulate in writing which PCI requirements they are addressing and what areas of the PCI DSS is the responsibility of merchants.
A web hosting company may tell a merchant that the hosting company is PCI compliant. The merchant thought, they have nothing left to do. The reality is there is still always something a merchant needs to do, they just didn’t always recognize what that was.
In v3.0, service providers, specifically value-added resellers (VARs), also need to assign unique passwords, as well as employ two-factor authentication, to each of their merchants in order to remotely access the networks of those merchants. VARs often employ weak passwords or use one password to access multiple networks, which makes it easier for fraudsters to breach multiple systems.
The PCI SSC is trying to at least make it more difficult for the bad guys to break into one site and then move to the hub, so to speak, and then go to all the other different spokes with the same attack.
Overall, v3.0 is more granular by more accurately matching appropriate security controls to specific types of merchants, even though the approach may add complexity to merchants’ compliance obligations. On the whole a lot of these changes are very positive.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit Card Security, Payment Card Industry PCI Security Tagged with: (PCI SSC), call centers, cardholder data, consumers, credit-card, customers, data breaches, data security assessments, Data Security Standard, e-commerce breaches, e-commerce businesses, e-commerce merchant's website, electronic payments, global data security, global standard, Merchant's, merchant’s website, mobile, networks, payment, payment card data, Payment Card Industry, payment providers, PCI Security Standards Council, PCI-DSS, Penetration testing, Service providers, shopping cart, software solutions, web hosting, website
September 17th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Commuters using the London tube network can now tap their contactless bank cards on the ticket barriers to pay for their journeys, further displacing cash on the capital’s transit system.
Fares are cheaper than cash, with users being charged adult pay as you go fares and benefiting from daily and Monday to Sunday fare capping. Customers without bank cards will continue to benefit from cheaper fares through Transport for London’s Oyster card.
This is not the end of Oyster and it’s not the end of cash, but it is a significant dent in the market for cash.
The move follows the abolition of cash on London’s buses and covers all tube, overground, DLR, tram and National Rail services that accept Oyster.
The shift to contactless has future-proofed the capital’s transit system for up-and-coming innovations in payments. You can already use your mobile phones to make your payments and tap and go through the tube turnstiles, and in the future it will open up many other connected devices as well, whether that’s smart wristbands or smart watches.
An incredible response to the launch of contactless payments on London Buses with nearly 19 million Visa contactless journeys made since it launched in 2012. Today’s launch will be another major boost to contactless usage leading to the three-fold increase expected in the next year. To coincide with the rollout, Londoners are invited to sign up for 10,000 free bPay contactless payments bands. Its wearable device will let commuters pay for their journeys with a wave of their wrists and help avoid card clash.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: bank, card clash, cards, contactless bank cards, contactless payments, customers, devices, mobile, mobile phones, network, payments, phones, smart watches, smart wristbands, Visa contactless journeys, wearable device
September 17th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Host Card Emulation (HCE) offers virtual payment card issuers the promise of removing dependencies on secure element issuers such as mobile network operators (MNOs). HCE allows issuers to run the payment application in the operating system (OS) environment of the smart phone, so the issuing bank does not depend on a secure element issuer. This means lower barriers to entry and potentially a boost to the NFC ecosystem in general. The issuer will have to deal with the absence of a hardware secure element, since the OS environment itself cannot offer equivalent security. The issuer must mitigate risk using software based techniques, to reduce the risk of an attack. Considering that the risk is based on probability of an attack times the impact of an attack, mitigation measures will generally be geared towards minimizing either one of those.
To reduce the probability of an attack, various software based methods are available. The most obvious one in this category is to move part of the hardware secure element’s functionality from the device to the cloud (thus creating a cloud based secure element). This effectively means that valuable assets are not stored in the easily accessible device, but in the cloud. Secondly, user and hardware verification methods can be implemented. The mobile application itself can be secured with software based technologies.
Should an attack occur, several approaches exist for mitigating the Impact of such an attack. On an application level, it is straightforward to impose transaction constraints (allowing low value and/or a limited number of transactions per timeframe, geographical limitations). But the most characteristic risk mitigation method associated with HCE is to devaluate the assets that are contained by the mobile app, that is to tokenize such assets. Tokenization is based on replacing valuable assets with something that has no value to an attacker, and for which the relation to the valuable asset is established only in the cloud. Since the token itself has no value to the attacker it may be stored in the mobile app. The principle of tokenization is leveraged in the cloud based payments specifications which are (or will soon be) issued by the different card schemes such as Visa and MasterCard.
HCE gives the issuer complete autonomy in defining and implementing the payment application and required risk mitigations (of course within the boundaries set by the schemes). However, the hardware based security approach allowed for a strict separation between the issuance of the mobile payment application on one hand and the transactions performed with that application on the other hand. For the technology and operations related to the issuance, a bank had the option of outsourcing it to a third party (a Trusted Service Manager). From the payment transaction processing perspective, there would be negligible impact and it would practically be business as usual for the bank.
This is quite different for HCE-based approaches. As a consequence of tokenization, the issuance and transaction domains become entangled. The platform involved in generating the tokens, which constitute payment credentials and are therefore related to the issuance domain, is also involved in the transaction authorization.
HCE is offering autonomy to the banks because it brings independence of secure element issuers. But this comes at a cost, namely the full insourcing of all related technologies and systems. Outsourcing becomes less of an option, largely due to the entanglement of the issuance and transaction validation processes, as a result of tokenization.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit Card Security, EMV EuroPay MasterCard Visa, Near Field Communication, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: (MNOs), (OS), assets, bank, card, card issuers, cloud, cloud based payments, cloud based secure element, cloud-based, hardware secure element, Host Card Emulation (HCE), issuing bank, MasterCard, mobile, mobile app, mobile application, mobile network operators, mobile payment, mobile payment application, nfc, operating system, payment application, payment transaction, payments, platform, risk, secure element, smart phone, software, software based technologies, token, tokenization, transaction, virtual payment, visa
September 15th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Visa has taken advantage of the hoopla surrounding Apple’s application of digital account tokens to replace card numbers for online and mobile purchasing by initiating the roll out of its Token Service to US clients.
Visa Tokens will be made available to issuing financial institutions globally, starting with US banks next month, and followed by a phased roll-out overseas beginning in 2015. The technology has been designed to support payments with mobile devices using all major mobile platforms.
More than 750 staff from across the Visa organisation globally were involved in the effort, working closely with initial launch partners – financial institutions, merchants and processors to ensure the ecosystem was ready. Today, Visa is making these services available and believe it will help transform connected devices and wearables into secure payment vehicles.
Visa Token Service replaces sensitive payment account information found on plastic cards with a digital account number or token. Because tokens do not carry a consumer’s payment account details, such as the 16-digit account number, they can be safely stored by online merchants or on mobile devices to for e-commerce and mobile payments.
The release of the service has been given added urgency by a spate of successful hacks on merchant card data stores, such as the recent plundering of card account data at Home Depot and Target.
MasterCard has its own equivalent Digital Enablement Service, which will be released outside of the US in 2015.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit Card Security, e-commerce & m-commerce, Mobile Payments, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: account details, card, card account data, card data, data, digital account, digital account number, e-commerce, financial institutions, MasterCard, merchant card data, Merchant's, mobile, Mobile Devices, Mobile Payments, mobile platforms, online merchants, payments, processors, Token Service, tokens, visa, Visa organisation, Visa Token Service, wearables
September 10th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Merchant go into business to make a sale. They go to great length to advertise their business and then they make a sale and don’t track it… They don’t track the very customer they went into business to attract…That seems crazy…But now more companies are embracing the practice of collecting email addresses at the point of sale (POS) and they’re doing so with increasing regularity. An example, when customers are at the cash register, many brick-and-mortar stores now offer to email them receipts
Confidently collect email addresses at POS:
Your email service provider should be able to implement a text-to-join acquisition program for you that executes quickly and can be built specifically to mitigate the risks around POS data collection.
Instead of relying on sales associates to accurately input email addresses, your customers can use SMS to text their email addresses to your short code.
Customers receive an immediate SMS reply message letting them know to check their email for their receipt.
A mobile-optimized receipt is immediately emailed to the address.
This can be followed by an email inviting customers to join your company’s email program. Offering a purchase discount can increase opt-ins. New joiners can be sent an age verification email, if relevant.
Your welcome email, including discount coupon, is sent and the relationship starts off on the right foot.
Increasing your confidence about POS email address collection, a text-to-join program can increase your acquisition rates. It can engage those customers who prefer to provide their information privately via their mobile devices. It can help protect companies against potential blacklisting because of typos and confirmed opt-ins. It can even reduce overhead costs by saving sales associates valuable time. Understanding these important email address collection issues and adopting the prescribed best practices are critical to ensuring customers have a safe, positive and valuable experience with your company at the point of sale and beyond.
Virtual Merchant can collect data too, and as a provider we can help merchant use that data. We are committed to providing appropriate protection for the information that is collected from customers who visit the website and use the Virtual Merchant payment system. Policy Privacy is updated from time to time.The website is provided to our customers as a business service and use of the site is limited to customers only.
If the merchant never makes a sale before 10 why do they open at 9 ?? This is only one small example on how collecting data first and then analyzing that data can shape businesses and find money you may be throwing away ….
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale Tagged with: brick and mortar, business, cash, cash register, customers, data, discount, discount coupon, email, merchant, mobile, Mobile Devices, payment, payment system, point of sale, policy, POS, provider, purchase, Rates, receipts, sale, service, sms, store's, virtual merchant, website
September 10th, 2014 by Elma Jane
If your businesses considering an iPad point-of-sale (POS) system, you may be up for a challenge. Not only can the plethora of providers be overwhelming, but you must also remember that not all iPad POS systems are created equal. iPad POS systems do more than process payments and complete transactions. They also offer advanced capabilities that streamline operations. For instance, they can eliminate manual data entry by integrating accounting software, customer databases and inventory counts in real time, as each transaction occurs. With these systems, you get 24/7 access to sales data without having to be in the store. The challenge, however, is knowing which provider and set of features offer the best iPad POS solution for your business. iPad POS systems vary in functionality far more than the traditional POS solutions and are often targeted at specific verticals rather than the entire market. For that reason, it’s especially important to compare features between systems to ultimately select the right system for your business.
To help you choose a provider, here are things to look for in an iPad POS system.
Backend capabilities
One of the biggest benefits of an iPad POS system is that it offers advanced features that can streamline your entire operations. These include backend processes, such as inventory tracking, data analysis and reporting, and social media integration. As a small business, two of the most important time saving and productivity-boosting features to look for are customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities and connectivity to other sales channels. You’ll want an iPad POS that has robust CRM and a customizable customer loyalty program. It should tell you which products are most and least frequently purchased by specific customers at various store locations. It should also be able to identify the frequent VIP shoppers from the less frequent ones at any one of your store locations, creating the ultimate customer loyalty program for the small business owner. If you own an online store or use a mobile app to sell your products and services, your iPad POS software should also be able to integrate those online platforms with in-store sales. Not only will this provide an automated, centralized sales database, but it can also help increase total sales. You should be able to sell effortlessly through online, mobile and in-store channels. Why should your customers be limited to the people who walk by your store? Your iPad POS should be able to help you sell your products through more channels, online and on mobile. E-commerce and mobile commerce (mCommerce) aren’t just for big box retailers.
Cloud-based
The functions of an iPad POS solution don’t necessarily have to stop in-store. If you want to have anytime, anywhere access to your POS system, you can use one of the many providers with advanced features that give business owners visibility over their stores, its records and backend processes using the cloud. The best tablet-based POS systems operate on a cloud and allow you to operate it from any location you want. An iPad POS provider, with a cloud-based iPad POS system, businesses can keep tabs on stores in real time using any device, as well as automatically back up data. This gives business owners access to the system on their desktops, tablets or smartphones, even when not inside their stores. Using a cloud-based system also protects all the data that’s stored in your point of sale so you don’t have to worry about losing your data or, even worse, getting it stolen. Because the cloud plays such a significant role, businesses should also look into the kind of cloud service an iPad POS provider uses. In other words, is the system a cloud solution capable of expanding, or is it an app on the iPad that is not dependent on the Internet? Who is the cloud vendor? Is it a premium vendor? The type of cloud a provider uses can give you an idea about its reliability and the functions the provider will offer.
Downtime and technical support
As a small business, you need an iPad POS provider that has your back when something goes wrong. There are two types of customer support to look for: Downtime support and technical support.
iPad POS systems are often cheaper and simpler than traditional systems, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore the product support needs. The POS is a key element of your business and any downtime will likely result in significant revenue loss. You could, for instance, experience costly downtime when you lose Internet connectivity. iPad POS systems primarily rely on the Web to perform their core functions, but this doesn’t mean that when the Internet goes down, your business has to go down, too. Many providers offer offline support to keep your business going, such as Always on Mode. The Always on Mode setting enables your business to continue running even in the event of an Internet outage. Otherwise, your business will lose money during a loss of connectivity. Downtime can also happen due to technical problems within the hardware or software. Most iPad POS providers boast of providing excellent tech support, but you never really know what type of customer service you’ll actually receive until a problem occurs.
Test the friendliness of customer service reps by calling or emailing the provider with questions and concerns before signing any contracts. This way, you can see how helpful their responses are before you purchase their solution. Your POS is the most important device in your store. It’s essentially the gateway to all your transactions, customer data and inventory. If anything happens to it, you’ll need to be comfortable knowing that someone is there to answer your questions and guide you through everything.
Grows with your business
All growing businesses need tech solutions that can grow right along with them. Not all iPad POS systems are scalable, so look for a provider that makes it easy to add on more terminals and employees as your business expands. Pay attention to how the software handles growth in sales and in personnel. As a business grows, so does it sales volume and the required software capabilities. Some iPad POS solutions are designed for very small businesses, offering very limited features and transactions. If you have plans for growth, look for a provider that can handle the changes in transactions your business will be going through. Find out about features and customization. Does the system do what you want it to do? Can it handle large volume? How much volume? What modules can you add, and how do you interface to third parties? You should also consider the impacts of physical expansion and adding on new equipment and employees. If there are plans in the future for you to open another store location, you’ll need to make sure that your point of sale has the capabilities of actually handling another store location without adding more work for you. If you plan on hiring more employees for your store, you’ll also want to know that the solution you choose can easily be learned, so onboarding new staff won’t take up too much of your time.
Security
POS cyber attacks have risen dramatically over the past couple of years, making it more critical than ever to protect your business. Otherwise, it’s not just your business information at risk, but also your reputation and entire operations. iPad POS system security is a bit tricky, however. Unlike credit card swipers and mobile credit card readers that have long-established security standards namely, Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance — the criteria for the iPad hardware itself as a POS terminal aren’t quite so clear-cut. Since iPads cannot be certified as PCI compliant, merchants must utilize a point-to-point encryption system that leaves the iPad out of scope. This means treating the iPad as its own system, which includes making sure it doesn’t save credit-card information or sensitive data on the iPad itself. To stay protected, look for PCI-certified, encrypted card swipers.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale Tagged with: (POS) systems, accounting, app, business, card, cloud-based, credit, credit card readers, credit-card, crm, customer, customer relationship management, customer support, data, data analysis, database, desktops, e-commerce, inventory, iPad Point-Of-Sale, loyalty program, mcommerce, mobile, mobile app, mobile commerce, online, online platforms, Payment Card Industry, payments, PCI, platforms, POS, POS solution, products, sales, Security, security standards, services, Smartphones, social media, software, tablets, terminal, transactions, web
September 4th, 2014 by Elma Jane
The move to mobile point of sale (mobile POS) is radically changing the face of customer interactions and payments, as both customers and merchants grow increasingly comfortable with the concept of mobile payments. In the current, crowded marketplace most mobile payment solutions are not compatible with each other. Instead of unifying the payment experience they create islands separated by technology or usage that are tailored to individual providers in the market. Multiple devices are currently needed in-store to process different payment types and the challenge is how they can make payments unified in such a way that only one device is needed in store.
The use of cash by customers also adds a level of complication to the mobile POS story. The removal of IDM terminals, removal of customer queues and ability for customers to simply walk up and pay an assistant or to leave a store and have their bank card automatically debited certainly suits the expectations of customers today, however a large number of customers still use traditional cash methods to pay for goods and services. A number of stores that have gone down the route of implementing mobile POS now have a problem dealing with cash because the wandering shop assistants and personal shoppers can only accept card or web-based payment options. The future for mobile POS has potential to be bright, a dominant player will have to emerge in the market. This will break down the technology barriers and usage barriers between different players. The success to mobile POS lies in the payment process being truly unified with one device in one place and very seamless workflow. This will be very complicated thing to achieve, there have been a lot of attempts and a lot of false starts in the history of mobile POS. MPOS will be the future. Five years from now people will be amazed that they did transactions with landlines. NO child will ever see a telephone with a cord attached. Never a popcorn on top of the stove since we developed microwave ovens. Technology changes, and we are slow to adopt new stuff. Once we change we don’t know how we did without it.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale, Smartphone Tagged with: bank, card, cash, customer, devices, IDM terminals, Merchant's, mobile, mobile point of sale, MPOS, payment solutions, payment types, payments, point of sale, POS, provider's, services, technology, terminals, web-based payment
