Is Tablet POS Ready For Prime Time?

By Brian Albright, Business Solutions magazine

Keep your tablet point of sale options open and flexible, or risk missing out on new business.

Tablet-based and other mobile point of sale solutions are quickly gaining ground in the POS market. According to a report published by the Mobey Forum late in 2013, mobile POS is projected to have a 46 percent market penetration by 2017, up from 17 percent in 2012.

Resellers are adapting to this trend by offering tablets as add-ons to existing, traditional POS systems (which can generate add-on revenue), or as stand-alone POS solutions in smaller businesses (which may have passed on POS deployment before). “While some lower-end tablet POS applications are designed as a cash register/card terminal replacement, there is a handful of tablet POS vendors that combined a tablet user interface with powerful back end management features accessed through the cloud to offer a viable replacement for traditional POS solutions for small to midsize retailers,” says Kevin Kogler, president of MicroBiz.