We’ve all seen it before. The agonizing sight of a shopping cart or basket discarded without the slightest hesitation after a customer enters and exits a retail location. What causes customers to abandon their potential purchases? First, you have to take a look at the different avenues for buying goods. On one hand, there are brick-and-mortar locations that are exceedingly convenient for customers who take a more tactile approach to shopping and want their products in their hand before they complete the purchase. However, the drawback here occurs when there are a thousand other people with a similar penchant for having first-hand knowledge of the goods or services they’re about to buy.
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Don’t Make Consumers Wait
In fact, Retail Week reported that 56 percent of shoppers would avoid going back to a specific store if there were exorbitant lines and poor expediting procedures to handle a large number of customers. Time being the limited resource that it is, it’s hard to be particularly surprised about this fact. How does this translate to abandoned shopping carts?
The same principle applies. Longer wait times inside retail locations gives shoppers a greater amount of time to comparison shop. No longer are retail shoppers bound by the limits of technology, as the Pew Internet & American Life Project so clearly demonstrates. With 56 percent of adults in the U.S. walking around with smartphones, retailers have to contend with e-commerce even as consumers are strolling up and down the aisles.
Adopt Technology for Quicker POS Conversion
One clear answer to this problem is speed of service, and that means co-opting the technology that can sometimes work against the business. Mobile devices have become one of the more efficient means for point of sale, or POS, conversion. Already, businesses have adopted this technology at a staggering rate. The 2020 Foresight Report “Mobile Point of Sale Technology” indicated between 2011 and 2012 the global integration of MPOS devices expanded by 111 percent.
Related: Find a POS system perfect for your business.
At first, these devices seemed to be exclusive to the professionals behind Apple’s “Genius Bar,” equipped with iPhones that could process credit card payments without the slightest delay. Now, they’re nearly ubiquitous. Retail Week emphasized the role mPOS has in reducing the length of lines in store, but also the way it affords employees to interact with customers on a whole new level. Customers and retail staff stand face-to-face, building a relationship that extends from behind the register. Customer service representatives can more easily address any questions or concerns that a shopper may have, and it is a far more economical use of space than installing a greater number of registers in retail locations.
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Small business owners can appreciate the need to maximize the amount of space available in a given location, as well as the need to build customer loyalty through more personalized relationships. Beyond iPhones, MPOS technology providers have created equipment that can attach to Android and Blackberry devices as well, opening a wide range of possibilities for businesses looking to improve customer interactions and satisfaction.
