NEW REPORT: Small Retailers Play Big With Consumer-Friendly Tech

Whether they realize it or not, consumers have increasingly cutting-edge expectations of the merchants and companies with which they do business. And for the companies trying to keep up, the scramble is on.

From technology and financial service providers expanding their offerings to software designers aiming to provide the same technology boasted by national chains to small and local merchants, companies around the Developer space have recently been looking to weave more technology into transactions.

Around the Developer World

Over the past month, several companies made new or expanded investments into bringing new payment technology to more consumers around the globe.

TransferWise, for example, debuted a new chatbot designed to help users both communicate with businesses and complete transactions with them. The chatbot is designed to send money to and from the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and Europe from Facebook Messenger. It can also be used to set up exchange rate alerts.

Similarly, NCR is looking to bring mobile payment acceptance to Australia, as it expanded access to its Silver POS product to the country. The software, which enables mobile and card payment acceptance, is now available to download from Australian Apple and Android app stores.

Concert and festival fans are also going to be increasingly turning to tech for payments — or, at least they’ll have the option to do so. Organizers of this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival announced that all vendors will accept Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay via Square.

Bringing Tech to the Little Guys

With so many options for consumers to purchase products, retailers now increasingly need to beef up their technological offerings in order to keep up with competitors and survive, let alone thrive.

And for small grocery stores and specialty food and beverage chains, keeping up with deep-pocketed industry goliaths, the largest of which can bring in more than $100 billion per year, can be quite an undertaking.

For the April Developer Tracker’s Feature Story, PYMNTS caught up with Burt Aycock, director of design for ECR Software, a company that develops solutions for smaller grocery and specialty food and beverage merchants. Aycock told PYMNTS that these smaller chains can use technology to offer secure and personalized solutions that give consumers the control and convenience offered by other chains, including features like online shopping.

“That’s really just another POS lane when it comes down to it,” Aycock said of online sales capabilities, noting that much of the same software and code that powers in-store sales can be used for online channels. “It’s really just about bringing that same sales technology from in-store to the cloud and putting a user-friendly interface on it, so that consumers can make their purchases online in a simple fashion.”

Find the full story, along with rankings of top providers and news from around the Developer space, inside this month’s Tracker.

To download the April edition of the PYMNTS.com Developer Tracker, powered by Vantiv, click the button below…

About the Tracker

The PYMNTS.com Developer Tracker, powered by Vantiv, provides the payments ecosystem with a view into how software developers are using new technologies to create innovative business opportunities and enable merchants to optimize the ways in which they engage with shoppers today. The developer community within the tracker is separated into three categories: Shopping and Payments, Operations and Marketing.