Can your iPad become a cash register?

Can your iPad become a cash register?

When I was running an IT support business, cash registers were one of the banes of our life.

Retail point of sale (POS) systems are almost always arcane, clunky and difficult to maintain. At PC Rescue we always dreaded a call from a shop, pub or hairdresser having problems with their registers.

Frequently this was by design; the POS system supplier would try to lock their business customers into expensive support contracts.

By making it difficult for anybody without intimate knowledge of the product to actually do anything with it, the retailer was stuck having to hire overpriced customer support.

To make things worse, many of the POS systems ran on outdated hardware that offered the suppliers another opportunity to hit customers (victims?) with high support costs.

Since the iPad was released, I’ve been waiting for an application using cloud services for a back-end that challenges the existing point of sale systems. Today, US online payment system Square has announced their Square Register app.

While only available in the US, Square has been setting the pace for physical payment systems like taxi fares and coffee shops using online technologies, so it’s hardly surprising they are leading this push.

The iPad as a cash register is a logical step for the device and, tied in with a robust point of sales platform behind a simple to use app, it will probably make a huge dent in the point of sale market.

It may be the Square service won’t be the point of sale leader – Square is more a payments service than retail platform – which means this field is way open for some savvy operators.

One of the concerns with the Square service, and any iPad based application, is the spectre of vendor lock-in. Being fixed on the iOS platform means there is a risk of being held hostage to Apple’s business plans; also being locked into Square’s payment systems may not be the best choice for many merchants. 

The payments and point of sale industry is another that’s being radically changed by mobile devices coupled with cloud computing. It’s not a time for incumbents to rest on their laurels.
For businesses in retail, this will be an opportunity to demand a better deal from POS suppliers and banks.

Paul travelled to the Kickstart forum courtesy of Media Connect.

Business Tech Talk explores how technology is changing our companies, markets and society. Business owner, blogger and broadcaster Paul Wallbank looks at how we can use the net, computers and smartphones to make our businesses more profitable and competitive.