When you give customers more payment options at the point of sale, you may be encouraging them to shop at your stores again in the future, especially if you offer mobile payments. There are numerous mobile payment options already, such as PayPal and LevelUp, and now stores are entering the digital payment marketplace.

Major retailers, such as big-box stores, have begun to offer apps that shoppers can download and use to pay for their purchases instead of cash or credit cards, and this may be the wave of the future, according to Reuters. Recent Gartner research predicted that the global market for mobile payments is set to triple by 2017, which could give retailers a leg-up on the competition if they adopt this technology sooner rather than later.

Retailers don't necessarily have to develop their own mobile payment software, as there are plenty of third-party options to choose from. Reuters reported that the competition in this growing sector of consumer payment services could result in lower retailer fees for payment processing and bring down costs.

Gartner predicted that the mobile payment market could be worth as much as $721 billion by 2017, with more than 450 million people using the services to make purchases, so retailers might want to start looking into mobile payment options that they can integrate with their POS software to improve the buyer experience.

This entry was posted by Retail Pro on Monday, April 7th, 2014 at 10:50 am .