Moving Upstream, PayPal and Square Make a Play for the Local Merchant’s POS
There’s a not-too-quiet rivalry brewing between Square and PayPal over offline payments, and this week saw the unofficial opening of an important new theatre: the SMB point of sale (POS). It’s perhaps the stickiest problem for both companies to solve in order to make payments work, and their respective announcements demonstrate a strategic skism similar to what we’ve seen in desktop computers and mobile phones..
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Acquires MashLogic, EveryBlock Could Be Sold
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Groupon Acqui-Hires MashLogic, Will Shutter Britely Plugin This weekend (PandoDaily)… EveryBlock Could Still Be Sold, Says Schiller, After Abrupt Closing of Hyperlocal Pioneer (Poynter)… After Acquiring 15 Groupon Clones, CrowdSavings Finds a Buyer for Itself (AllThingsD)…
6 POS Systems With Loyalty Program Integration
With an increasing number of cloud-based point-of-sale systems now offering their own loyalty tools — and some offering integration with existing rewards programs — merchants have fewer and fewer reasons to pay for separate software systems when managing their small to mid-size businesses. Here are six point-of-sale systems that merchants can use to market their businesses and encourage repeat visits…
Case Study: The Benefits of Running a POS System in the Cloud
When David Steingard began researching point-of-sale systems to use at Laughing Man, the New York City coffee shop he founded with the actor Hugh Jackman in 2011, he was surprised at how expensive checkout terminals had become. Rather than paying $15,000 to $30,000 for a traditional POS system, Steingard opted to go with ShopKeep, a mobile system that runs on the iPad…
Bringing SMB Point-of-Sale Systems to the Cloud
The introduction of SaaS POS has broad implications, not only for payment firms like Square, but also a host of other loyalty and lead generation start-ups that have worked to tie into the point of sale over the past 18 months. It brings scalable access to real-time data on nearly every inch of local retailers’ operations, not only accelerating existing sectors like loyalty and rewards but opening new opportunities for key services like live inventory search…