The Mobile Commerce Revolution

This white paper from VeriFone discusses retail point-of-sale (POS) estates and how the emergence of mobile commerce will require retailers to utilize their POS infrastructure to reach consumers in store, allowing them to influence behavior favorably for a purchase. Payment technology is taking a powerful role in retail strategy, and its speed, security, and reliability are important, however, by the time a customer is providing payment your time to influence them has mostly passed.

Engaging mobile oriented customers can be difficult and retailers have looked to multimedia, touch screens, self-service, and mobile- and tablet-based retail platforms to provide value to convenience-focused customers in the store. Beyond this, being able to communicate with a consumer’s own smart device will be essential in the future. Mobile apps are common among retailers, but rarely are these applications anything more than catalogs which are unable to communicate to retail systems to allow you to leverage the consumer’s presence in a meaningful way.

In terms of communicating with customer devices in-store, this paper notes, “That will soon change as Near Field Communications (NFC) is adopted by major phone manufacturers and millions of phones reach consumers equipped with mobile wallets and mobile apps enabled for commerce. Retailers may finally be able to connect directly to the consumer’s mobile phone while in store and use that as a tool for customer loyalty and service enhancement.”

Download this white paper from VeriFone below to read more.