Will Renewed Retail Interest in Mobile POS Actually Stick Around This Time?

In a recent interview conducted by Retail Touchpoints editor Nicole Silberstein, Nikki Baird — VP of strategy and product for Aptos — outlined her thoughts on a number of pressing issues relevant to today's retail business.

RFID — gaining momentum with proponents as the cost of the tech declines and consumer tastes align — and the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming holiday season were discussed at length, but the lead-in to the interview was largely centered around mobile POS solutions, and a renewed appetite surrounding deployment thereof.

Mobile POS Means Retailers Can Ditch the Cash Wrap (For More Than One Reason)

Baird was quick to point out that mobile POS was a driving force behind the tech refresh common to so many retailers looking to update their brick-and-mortar operations.

"It does really feel like mobile is an impetus driving technology refresh in stores right now. Retailers want mobile to be more closely integrated into the role of the store employee and store manager," Baird began.

"They have long complained about how Apple is a different kind of experience and that they can’t be cash wrap-less [like Apple], and yet now I do see many rethinking and really shrinking down that cash wrap and wanting the store associate to be out in front of the cash wrap instead of behind it," she added.

One major positive to getting employees out from behind the cash wrap, in a static position, is that the sales floor has more human presence, or points of contact, improving customer service (and, likely, basket size and overall purchasing).

Another basis — and perhaps an even more attractive reason — for the renewed interest in mobile POS? Scrapping the floor space dedicated to the checkout.

"I still see some analysts in the industry who distinguish between fixed-till versus mobile, and with tablet formats it really can be both. In fact, a lot of the drive behind mobile now is not employee productivity so much as it is reducing the hardware footprint in stores. They need fewer devices, and they need devices that can be multi-purpose. [With mobile you] can have a shared cash drawer [instead of] a big till that’s a full tech stack of receipt printer, cash drawer, scanner and all those peripherals. And that does seem to be what’s driving this renewed interest in [mobile tech] — that there’s no distinguishing between fixed-till versus mobile, it’s all the same devices," Baird said.

A 'Holistic' Front and Back of Store View Still Facing Difficulties, and Security as well as Compliance Concerns Remain

It's not all sunshine and rainbows when it comes to mobile POS solutions coming online in the broader retail segment, however.

As Baird noted, Apple appears to be winning the front of store race, while Android is holding dominance in the back of the store. So, while Apple solutions may be more prevalent for sales floor associate use cases, things such as inventory management, receiving, cycle counts, and picking orders for omnichannel requests are being handled by "traditional retail-hardened Zebra kind of device[s]."

This bifurcation is preventing a "holistic picture of the store environment," she added, and that divide may need to be repaired before mobile POS can gain a more rock-solid foothold. Mobile device management (MDM), regarding logistical concerns related to powering the array of retail mobile devices attached to the store, also lacks an intelligent, unified structure unless one vendor supplies the bulk of a location's equipment — a front on which progress is also being made.

Baird also spoke to the emerging security and compliance concerns attached to the gathering of customer data and the transmission thereof.

"When you get into customer data then we will see more of a push for a local model on a device and not sending that data over the cloud, even within a retailer’s network. If you can have a local language model on the device, and you can have that interaction at the local level, then the security profile is much more manageable," she said.

In tandem with AI integration on front-line retail, retailers are responding via the creation of AI approval councils, designed to massage enterprise compliance with governmental-slash-jurisdictional legal demands pertinent to customer data. While the EU is the proving ground for much of these discussions, compliance concerns are being tackled proactively stateside.

"We’re in compliance training season, and I’m taking the EU AI compliance training, and let me tell you, anything that uses consumer and personal information in the EU is going to be a constraint. We actually have some retailers that are instituting AI Approval councils. So the retailer is saying, 'If you have an AI initiative, you have to put together what it is, what data it’s using, how it’s using that data and what kind of result it’s going to return, and you have to submit it to the committee for review, and it has to be approved before you can go off and do it,'" Baird concluded.