Payments innovators are pushing past omnichannel retailing to meld POS-capable channels tied to databases. It’s a unified commerce approach that brings capabilities like checkout anywhere on the sales floor.
By creating digital environments in physical retail spaces, new customer interactions are enabled that not only allow consumers to skip the line, but also improve customer experience and ultimately increase sales for merchants.
“Customers now expect a seamless experience across all the merchant’s touch points,” Petur Sigurdsson, product director at LS Retail, an Aptos Company, told PYMNTS. “The concept of unified commerce is really of essence here.”
Pointing to a blurring of channels happening between physical stores and eCommerce, Sigurdsson said retailers are realizing the potential of remaking point-of-sale (POS) terminals in new and different configurations that bring them onto the sales floor where the shoppers are — the way Apple Stores have done for years.
This is taking several forms.
“One is to deploy mobile POS in, let’s say, a clienteling context,” he said. “There we are bringing personalization to the shop floor.”
With client and product data maintained in a centralized data source, “the sales associate has access to all of the information on the device, so they can provide rich detail on the shop floor,” he said.
This also puts “proactive disclosure of deals, coupons, what you might be entitled to in the loyalty club and in which loyalty tier you are at the moment” into the hands of roaming sales associates, enabling a more complete and satisfying interaction on the sales floor, Sigurdsson said.
See also: Unattended Retail and Multi-Device Payment Systems Set to Reshape Checkout
Putting POS in the Blender
In action, creating eCommerce-like shopping and checkout experiences in physical settings has impressive potential to move shoppers to purchase in aisle, equipping associates with all the data a website would have, but in a more human — and ideally pleasing — interaction.
Going back to the loyalty example, Sigurdsson described “being able to issue personalized offers and coupons on top of standard loyalty points” as ways that eCommerce, mobile commerce, and physical retail can be blended.
Along with these advances in mobile POS and mobile commerce more broadly is the option for the consumer to do it all themselves in whatever setting they choose, without any interaction.
That’s the beauty of unattended retail, as it allows regulars to identify as loyal customers, reorder their favorite meal with a single click “instead of once more specifying to a service agent that you would like to skip the onions and size up your fries,” Sigurdsson said.
“We see this not only in food and beverage,” he said. “We have these kiosks in the retail space as well, whether that’s Ikea or other do-it-yourself stores. Go to a kiosk to resolve a query instead of having to locate an employee that might be busy.”
That’s if an associate can be found at all these days, which is part of the point.
“We at LS Retail are perhaps a little bit more focused on the capability of having all this available in a unified commerce manner and across the channels,” he said. “It really blurs the line and is available on both the POS, stationary or mobile, a kiosk in a store, or an online platform.”
Read also: Scale up Digital Capabilities Now to Stay Ahead Tomorrow
True Self-Checkout Is up Next
As unified commerce adds value to omnichannel, a step change that’s dawning is the ability for shoppers to download a POS checkout app on their own smartphone and do it all, simply enjoying the ambiance of the physical retail environment without associates or checkout lines.
Consumers who download a self-checkout app to their phone are free to roam through the store, “use your phone to capture the barcode and see the full information about the item on your phone,” he said. “When it’s time to check out, you have a choice to move the cart from your phone to a checkout lane or [to] conveniently check out through your phone.”
In these ways, sometimes fragmented experiences that can happen with omnichannel version 1.0 are avoided by unifying all touch points via digital means, redefining “seamless.”
“At LS Retail, we like to view this from a paradigm of unified commerce where all the data is driven from a centralized solution and accessible on all touch points,” Sigurdsson said. “Whether that’s point of sale in the store, a kiosk, or online or apps.”
“Instead of trying to erase the feeling of crossing channels, we would rather ensure that all of the data and all of the features are available on all of the channels, thereby removing the perception of these disjointed silos,” he said.
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