Mobile Metrics are a Global Future

Featured article by Philip Piletic, aspiring writer and blogger

Mobile payment – you’ve heard all about it, right? First it was Google Wallet, then it was Apple Pay. Say, when was the last time you’ve made a payment with either?

It’s a rather sad story involving industry behemoths with grand ambitions going up against leviathans with other ideas. We’d all love to pay with our phones, but no one seems to be able to make that happen.

Not yet, anyways. Newer, more agile companies are closing the gap. That’s the thing about smaller companies – they seem more able to grasp the value of a chop over the shortstop than the big guys gunning for the grand slams.

They’re also the only ones who seem to realize that absolutely everyone is completely okay with that. Think of the day when the touch of a screen and the swipe of a phone can handle your payments. No cash. No cards. Just phones.

The day will come when such methods become realities. It started with megaliths trying to take over the POS – arguably the most important part of any customer-centric industry – but the real change is happening in the companies that are already realizing the value of the point of sale.

More and more companies have made entire businesses out of it. They’re not just revolutionizing the standard terminal, they’re also moving beyond, and they’re moving quickly.

Instead of creating entirely new mobile sale systems from scratch, embedded POS companies are putting their POS software into handheld devices. They didn’t leap to mobile payment, but their systems are built for it (Clipp Tab, for example).

Using a handheld POS system means a server can take an order at the table, immediately transfer the order to the kitchen and simultaneously generate a bill that’s available to every other sale system in the restaurant.

POS innovations will change the way we live. It can split the bill as many times as you like with the touch of a button. It can turn the cumulative orders into a daily report, and it can turn the report into a sales-to-plan analysis that the owner can view in real time.

Sales not meeting expectations? Marketing can see what customers are ordering and focus efforts, buyers can access the same data to keep purchases on par with sales and researchers can utilize it to create new product that more accurately reflects consumers ideals. All through point of sale.

Mobile pay is still the way of the future, it’s just taken a few good ideas to move far enough up the ladder to get there. When it does finally arrive, it will change everything all over again.

Look beyond the sales of a single outlet and beyond the reports of even the most lucrative of districts. Instantly available global metrics will revolutionize industry.

From city to city, district to district and region to region, mobile pay will take on the abilities of even our most advanced POS systems to levels that used to require the meticulous aggregation of analytics from across the globe.

Is one item selling well in one country, but not another? Sales and marketing strategies will be remade in light of a fast moving era. Is it selling well on a global scale? Even expansion of lines will be automated on an order that can placed in time to catch a trend on its heels.

We all know that, soon enough, it will all be automated. Mobile payment goes far beyond any single company. It means global aggregation of global data from every channel of every industry. As the stock market has become the slave of automation, so too will global sales and marketing.

This may not be what everyone in business would like to hear, but it’s what they should prepare for. The ones who see the future will be ready. The ones who cling to old ideals will be lost in the dust of progress.

Philip Piletic is an aspiring writer and blogger with a love for business, finance and technology. His goal is to give useful advice and help people adapt to ever evolving world of today.