Payments, POS, Security, And Cloud-Based Services Resellers: Who Is Your Competition?

By Sean Berg, Shift4

The reseller landscape has experienced rapid change over the last several years. Previously, being an expert in POS or payments and offering hardware with updated features and functionality was enough to win over clients and receive their business. Now resellers face never-before-seen roadblocks in their path to success. To thrive in this new environment, resellers should take a hard look in the mirror and ask two questions: Who is my competition? and What can I do to succeed in a rapidly evolving industry?

A Brief History
By the 1960s, the credit card payments industry was well on its way to becoming fully formed. To accommodate this blossoming industry and make transactions even more convenient, IBM introduced the first computer-based POS system in the mid-1970s. Both payments and POS began as primitive industries, but over the next 45 to 50 years, they evolved into the complex industries they are today.

Over the years, resellers of payments and POS have honed their knowledge and expertise of the technology, as well as their sales pitches, to perfection. This led to two industries maxing out and converging to surpass their limits. By reinforcing POS with a payments model, resellers and point of sale providers gained recurring revenue from investing in their customers. Suddenly, POS resellers were experts in payments and payments resellers were experts in POS. When everyone becomes the expert in both areas, with service as the remaining differentiator. However, with technology accelerating this new industry quickly reached its limit and also became a commodity. Any reseller offering only point of sale technology and payments is in danger of obsolescence.