How Payments Technology Can Benefit Unattended Retail?

By: Retail CIO Outlook | Monday, January 06, 2020

The future of the retail industry is changing for the better thanks to payments technology. Besides, unattended retail is no exception.

FREMONT, CA: Significant transformations to the form and function of brick-and-mortar commerce are grabbing the attention of the retail industry. Changes in the way customers shop, from the choices to buy items online and pick them up in a store, to ordering food from an app for delivery, or checking out at a convenience store, have captured both the imagination of customers and substantial investment by retail players.

The transformations in the techniques the customers use to pay have given a boost to these innovations. Payments technology companies have digitized traditional cash or plastic transaction in order to create a frictionless, seamless, digital payment option for both customers and merchants.

Taking the example of mobile payments, the Electronic Transactions Association’s (ETA) 2019 State of Mobile Payments report showed that 55 million people in the U.S. made use of mobile payments in 2018. Moreover, 100 hundred million contactless-enabled bank cards that have NFC transmitters and allow for rapid and secure EMV transactions were used by consumers in 2019 alone.

This digital shift in payments has provided a tremendous opportunity to unattended and automated retail environments. These cashless payments have enhanced customer engagement and subsequently increased volume.

These contactless payments and mobile wallets make it impossible to rob a vending machine of its tokenized bytes and bits that are the payment, thus securing the machine against the danger of theft. The advanced payments data empower the owners to get real-time insights into their clients and the performance of their machines. With the contactless acceptance increasing in the storefronts and integrating into the public transit, parking, and other new ambiances, acceptance of these kinds of payments will become vital for the enterprises for their growth.

However, it cannot be said that cash has become irrelevant. Still, few in the payment technology industry foretell, or even aspire to, the eradication of cash. Cashless payments on unattended machines can stipulate such kinds of payments: low-performing machines that added cashless acceptance also faced a 97 percent enhancement in cash sales as per Visa.

So if retailers are planning to upgrade their machines, there are advised to consider differentiating their products from the competition by taking guidance from their payments provided for adding digital payments to their arsenal.