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“Mobile payments is so 2012,” says Alex Broeker, president of ATX Innovation, which provides the Tabbedout app. “2013 is about how the device allows you to communicate with your customer.”
The Tabbedout app lets consumers open, view and pay tabs at restaurants and. ATX launched a customer relationship management (CRM) tool this week to add functions beyond the payment process.
The company added the management tools to help merchants improve customer loyalty, says Broeker.
Other POS systems for restaurants take advantage of tablets, such as iPads and Android devices, so the consumer can peruse the menu, order food and pay with the device.
These systems are less costly than a PC-based setup; they are also designed for touch interface and store data in the cloud, says Martin Webb, founder of Tillify, which provides a web-based cash register system.
While Webb says it’s been a struggle to get merchants on board with tablet-based POS systems, a number of things happened in recent years that changed the way retailers thought about mobile devices at the point of sale.
“First hardware changed dramatically,” Webb says. “The iPad makes a brilliant POS terminal – no wires, nine hours of battery, a touchscreen and handheld mobility.”
Second, merchants and consumers have become a lot more tech-savvy since the 2007 introduction of the iPhone and the 2010 introduction of the iPad.
“For years, almost a decade, I have been intrigued by the backwardness and awkwardness of point-of-sale transactions,” Webb says.
Many other companies are also promoting tablet-based point of sale systems in various retailer environments. Square claims
Even with current POS technology and widespread loyalty programs, many transactions provide merchants with very little information about their customers, observers say.
When consumers pay with cash they’re completely anonymous to the merchant, says Rick Oglesby, mobile-pay expert and senior analyst at Aite Group. Credit cards offer more information, but mobile payments give merchants detailed information about a customer’s experience.
“A lot of organizations are trying to think about ways to use a [virtual] wallet that’s on the phone as a mechanism to help enable payments,” says Maria Arminio, president and CEO of Avenue B Consulting Inc.
Arminio says by asking consumer’s for phone numbers during checkout, merchants have been tying payments to specific people to target advertisements for years. Merchants use phone numbers as a reverse look up to find addresses.
“When merchants see a smartphone, an iPhone or Android device, they see a way to communicate with their customers,” Broeker says. “Merchants will now encourage people to pay with their mobile phones because … that’s the only reason merchants can see what consumers are ordering and target specific offers.”
With Tabbedout consumers’ mobile devices don’t need to be near terminals to pay; instead of waiting at a bar during last call, customers with the mobile app can pay during their cab ride home, Broeker says. The Tabbedout app prompts users with open bar tabs to pay, but if they forget, the bar or eatery can close out the tab and add a tip based on their normal policy for forgotten credit cards.
Tabbedout currently provides its mobile point of sale app to more than 1,000 merchants with hundreds of thousands of transactions processed every year.
