The retail shopping experience hasn’t evolved much in the past 10 years. While some retailers have introduced new technologies to enhance the in-store shopping experience, most retail environments remain fundamentally unchanged. Customers walk in, they pick up the goods they want and they wait in line at the checkout counter.
Mobile wallets may be great for consumers, but for U.S. retailers, trying to decide if and when they’d like to accept different wallets can drive them crazy. There are simply way too many options and with the growing number of mobile wallet apps in the market, it’s becoming more complicated for retailers to support them all.
The payment experience is starting to change in the US with the addition of more secure methods. Restaurants are addressing this evolution with the introduction of Pay-at-the-Table payment solutions. With this solution, restaurant servers bring a wireless payment solution to the diner’s table along with the check to process the payment, a method that is very common outside the US, especially in Europe. Diners will then use the terminal to pay with their preferred method of electronic payments, including EMV and mobile wallets such as Apple Pay®. By bringing payment to the consumer at the point of service, the chances of fraud are reduced as the card never leaves the customer’s possession. In a recent webinar on Pay-at-the-Table that I co-hosted, we received a lot of questions regarding this new payment solution. Below is a list of the most frequently asked questions regarding Pay-at-the-Table.
The hospitality industry sees a lot of payment transactions, and in most of these situations, the servers/staff takes the credit card from the customers to process the payment. In a typical dine-in restaurant environment, the server drops off the check, the customer puts their credit card in the billfold, the server then picks up the check, swipes the card in the back of the restaurant and brings the customer a receipt to sign. But, this payment experience is now starting to change…and for good reasons. Many hospitality businesses need to rethink how they accept payments and consider bringing payments to the consumer at the point of service as a viable option. Why? Let’s take a look at five reasons why paying at the point of service is beneficial to the hospitality businesses:
At the Yale commencement speech in 1962, John F. Kennedy said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” As the October 1st EMV liability shift gets closer in the U.S., merchants find themselves confused about EMV related issues. It’s common in such situations for the industry to be full of misinformation, rumors and myths about the new liability shift.
