Has mPOS Reached Its Tipping Point?

Welcome to the new monthly mPOS Tracker, a PYMNTS Special Report sponsored by ROAM. In this report, we rank the players that we track, and score these players based on numbers and types of devices used, geographies where solutions are implemented, the number of payment types accepted, and more.

This month’s report highlights the entrance of the world’s largest online craft marketplace, Etsy, with the launch of its reader, Sell. Etsy launched Sell on Etsy to cater to the roughly 35 percent of their one million registered merchants who are also selling goods at craft fairs and other physical locations. With roughly 90 percent of retail purchases still being made offline, its no wonder that Etsy wants to crack into that market, especially if it enables their merchants to deliver an omnichannel experience for their customers.

The report also highlights Square’s accomplishments, with its original dongle hitting its one-billionth transaction. Square’s milestone is in line with the recent reports of 30 percent growth of mobile POS annually over the past three years. Furthermore, this month saw the release of Poynt, a new, Android-based open architecture POS. Poynt operates on the belief that it can “future-proof” merchants for the next decade by enabling payment via swipe, chip, NFC, QR, and beacon. Perhaps this device will have enough strength to push mobile point of sale to the main stage for good.

Those who scored the highest this month were those whose platforms enable a variety of capabilities and functionalities – they have the greatest ability to support many retailers and fully monetize the mPOS ecosystem. Those players are: PayPal Here, Kalixa pro, GoPago, Adyen Shuttle, Vexilor from Givex, Creditcall, and ROAM. Two new players joined the mPOS pyramid this month: Etsy and Poynt. We also provided updates to nine players: Digital River, Ezetap, Infinite Peripherals, Handpoint, iZettle, goSwiff, Revel Systems, Spire Payments, and Square. More details can be found inside the report.

Here are the three key takeaways for this month:

1) Marketplaces go omnichannel: Etsy’s move is an interesting one aimed to take a bite of the 90% of commerce that still takes place offline. Their omnichannel approach is designed to help Etsy’s artisans sell to customers virtually anytime and anyplace, all from one integrated platform.

2) All in one payments makes its debut: With an abundance of types of payment acceptance and the EMV acceptance deadline on the horizon, small merchants may want to have many options of acceptance available to them but unable to afford the many readers. New approaches designed to help SMBs handle this in with an “all in one device” are interesting, but potentially risky. The only sure way to future proof payments is to move functionality to the cloud and remain device independent.

3) Has mPOS tipped?: mPOS has seen 30% year-over-year growth over the past three years and Square has reached its billionth transaction. Couple that with Infinite Peripherals reporting that 30% of the top 20 U.S. retailers have deployed their devices in their stores and it’s easy, now more than ever, to envision a world where mPOS is the norm, not the exception. While all devices may not be implemented at all stores, it is clear that retailers of all sizes are moving beyond experimentation of mPOS and towards full-scale roll out.

For a more detailed look at the ratings and rankings, click the download button below for a full copy of this month’s report.

THE MPOS PYRAMID NOVEMBER 2014

Information about these players is available in varying degrees of completeness. Details about volumes and shipments – the information that everyone finds most valuable – is not publicly available. We plan to update this report on a monthly basis to include new entrants, and updates on the players profiled in the prior month’s report. We are also in the process of compiling and will report out aggregated information about shipments and volumes. We encourage you to contact us at mobilepos@pymnts.com if you would like to be included in this report and/or would like us to update your information as we have presented it.