Retail, Grocery, And Hospitality IT News For VARs — December 1, 2014
By Phillip Britt, contributing writer
In the news, a survey shows holiday shoppers want to use mobile payments this holiday season. Also, surveys show technology is impacting brick-and-mortar stores.
More Mobile Payment For The Holidays
According to Retale, a little more than half of the season’s holiday shoppers want to use mobile payment methods this season. Of the 1,000 men and women surveyed, 56 percent find mobile payment easier and more convenient. A majority of survey respondents felt most comfortable using a mobile payment option for a purchase of a smaller dollar amount. While many had not used a mobile payment option prior to the survey, most of those surveyed felt that more stores should offer the acceptance of mobile payment options.
Mobile Meets Brick And Mortar
Forbes took a look at how the use of technology could be helping or hurting sales by brick-and-mortar stores based on a Gallup poll and a survey by Deloitte. The poll found that most younger consumers feel that their shopping time in actual stores has increased due to mobile technology. For the most part, technology is most easily understood by young adults and therefore targeting them is most useful. The study by Deloitte found that several reported that the use of mobile technology while shopping caused them to spend more than they’d originally planned. If a store targets younger people, it should offer SMS marketing while if the audience is more upscale clients, they should use both on- and offline marketing.
Hospitality Needs Front- And Back-End Technology To Compete Globally
Accor CEO Sébastien Bazin tells Skift that hotel companies tend to be slow to react to innovation because they haven’t considered their businesses to be as at risk from online competition and other disruptors as product businesses have. Yet new companies such as Trivago, Expedia, Booking.com have had an impact, and have driven down hospitality industry margins. He added that consumer-facing and the back-end technology have helped his company to be more global. He also stressed the need for hospitality employees to have access to the same types of mobile technologies that their customers use.
Retail, Grocery, And Hospitality IT Talking Points
Adweek reports Square now has three avenues of mobile payment. Snapchat users can now store their debit information and use Snapcash to send money to their Snap contacts. Second, Square told CNN that next year they will be accepting Apple Pay, though they’ve been competitors with Apple in the past. Finally, Square acknowledges the still popular motion of swiping a payment card. For this reason, users will be able to design their own gift cards, making Square payments attractive to more retailers.
A TechCrunch blog reports there is a new app called Milk, a way to save on groceries without clipping paper coupons. This comes on the heels of other coupon apps such as Groupon’s Snap app. Milk was created by the creators of Honey, an app helping find coupons for online shopping.
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