If you own a retail store, a service business, even a coffee shop, and you don’t have a mobile strategy – you need to consider getting one, fast.
Never mind that the only bright spot to the start of the holiday shopping season was online shopping, with Internet sales trumping physical store sales. And never mind that mobile purchases made up a whopping 30% of all online retail purchases from Black Friday (November 29th) to Cyber Monday (December 2nd).
This week, our CEO, John Perry, participated in a webinar/podcast hosted by PYMNTS.com, featuring ROAM Data and CUNA, on the importance of mobile POS – or mPOS for short – to the small-medium sized business.
First off, we all know how fast mobile is growing – but what’s even more interesting is how it is becoming applicable to any business. In Bluefin’s view, there are significant advantages to mPOS for SMBs, including:
- Reduced expenses by jettisoning that business phone line needed for standard credit card terminals and using Wi-Fi instead
- Improved reporting by allowing the device to sync to other applications such as Salesforce and keeping all data in one spot
- Saving on Visa and MasterCard rates by being able to take the POS to the customer if you have a remote delivery business model, such as contractors or plumbers
- Enhancing customer service by allowing the customer to check out anywhere in the store versus having to queue at a counter
And because mPOS is a newer way to purchase – security is naturally a concern/question. Chicken and egg: you really cannot have an mPOS strategy without a security strategy. So we have been working on our point-to-point encryption (P2PE) solution that we see as a key driver for adoption of payments through our mobile POS solution, QuickSwipe (which will be fully introduced this month).
