Enabling the Many Aspects of Mobility in Retail

The mobile revolution represents a major challenge for retailers worldwide. Leveraging a consumer’s own smart phone to deliver content and services to consumer smartphones anywhere has brought comparison shopping and showrooming to the retail floor, with cut throat pricing from online retailers cutting into retail floor sales and shaving margins. “Mobile” for a time was the dirty word that kept brick and mortar CEOs awake at night.

But brick and mortar retailers are shooting back by deploying several initiatives that leverage mobile technology to provide customers with a better in-store experience. Retailers are utilizing the consumer’s mobile device and enabling their own sales personnel with mobile technology to better engage consumers and transform the shopping experience.

Mobile apps and mobile wallets running on consumer handheld devices and mobile POS systems deployed on iPods and iPads provide retailers with options to turn the tables and level the playing field, if not tilt it in their own direction.

But the varied options and business models available can create a bewildering decision on what solution to choose from, how to integrate it and how to deploy chain wide.

VeriFone is working with many retailers today to integrate all this new technology with existing systems.

Eighty percent of the retailers currently accepting Google Wallet, PayPal and ISIS in the United States are doing so with the benefit of VeriFone solutions and services. These retailers didn’t have to replace their entire point of sale infrastructure or change the way they do their business. VeriFone came up with a way to enable all wallets and other value-added applications side-by-side, making it as easy for retailers to rationalize multiple apps in the same way they accept multiple card brands. More importantly, as more wallets and alternative payment methods emerge, retailers can add acceptance capability with a simple software download. So, retailers can easily test new approaches and establish new partnerships, seamlessly enabling them at the Point of Sale. All innovators are welcome.

VeriFone is also working with many retailers to equip sales associates with mobile devices on the shop floor for enhanced customer engagement, store efficiency and mobile payments. With PayWare Mobile Enterprise solution retailers can enable iPads and iPods to take secure payments from mag stripe and EMV cards as well as NFC mobile phones. To that platform they can add VeriFone’s GlobalBay suite of mobile retail applications. Mobile retail apps provide sales associates with customer and product information at their fingertips and the ability to cross sell, upsell, manage inventory and checkout consumers in real time anywhere inside and even outside the 4 store walls.

Even the smallest merchants globally can benefit from the mobile revolution. The Sail EMV solution enables mobile payments on any smartphone with mobile app, secure EMV audio reader and robust, online management tools in one completely integrated solution. Sail EMV is a secure platform available for banks that want to reach out to small merchants in more than 100 countries, across six continents.

Bottom line, for most retailers, the POS infrastructure is the backbone of store operations. They need 100% confidence that new devices and applications will run seamlessly with existing systems and will not disrupt store operations in any way. VeriFone has been working with retailers for years on implementing new innovations and we’re working with them to ensure they take advantage of the mobile revolution and not get overrun by it.