Payments as a Service Tracker: SMBs Bet On PaaS Solutions To Take On Online Giants

This holiday season, customers seem to be anything but happy. Their dissatisfaction was more than evident in the U.S. Commerce Department’s November report, which highlighted a slow start to the holiday shopping season.

The slow start exclusively bears bad news for brick-and-mortar stores.

Facing a downturn in customer foot traffic and fierce competition from major online players like Amazon, some physical retailers are now turning to Payments-as-a-Service solutions as a way to level the playing field by improving the customer experience.

PYMNTS recently spoke with Demian Wendrow, owner of London Harness, a leather goods store in Wellesley, Massachusetts, about how his store is turning to PaaS solutions to enhance the customer shopping experience through efficient EMV chip readers and customer loyalty programs. The December edition of the PYMNTS PaaS Tracker looks at how Wendrow’s store and several other companies are adopting these solutions to stay competitive.

What’s happening in the world of PaaS

For many merchants, PaaS solutions are quickly becoming the answer to providing smoother and meaningful payments experiences to customers.

Guest-focused businesses from car rentals to hotels are investing in solutions to help improve their customers’ experiences. Navotar, a car rental software provider, plans to work with Cardknox Development on a cloud-based POS system to help car rental customers authorize transactions, while Red Roof Inn tapped Ingenico Group to improve its checkout experience with a multimedia POS solution.

At the same time, hospitality and service industries are also recognizing the need to offer greater security as EMV transactions become more prevalent. A recent report found 42 percent of global transactions were EMV-compliant, up from 33 percent a year earlier. To that end, Shift4 plans to offer food and beverage, retail and hospitality companies secure EMV-certified payment gateway support using Oracle’s Payment Interface.

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To download the December edition of the Payments as a Service Tracker, click the button below.

About The Tracker

The PYMNTS.com Payments as a Service Tracker, in collaboration with Cayan, is designed to give an overview of the trends and activities of merchant platforms that not only enable payment processing of new and old technologies but also integrate with other features to improve the merchant’s experience, including customer engagement, security, omnichannel retail, analytics, inventory management, software and hardware management and more.