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I find your comment interesting and perhaps there's an implicit nod to Aloha/Radiant Systems somewhere in there? As someone directly involved in the market, I'm

by 18pfsmt 15y ago

I find your comment interesting and perhaps there's an implicit nod to Aloha/Radiant Systems somewhere in there? As someone directly involved in the market, I'm curious about your thoughts on where the opportunity (creating more card accepting merchants vs. winning market share of current participants) is right now wtf to the POS space. NCR just acquired Radiant Systems, so that seemed like an indicator of disruption in the space.

refulgentis 15y ago
I firmly believe the POS space is ripe for some really intense disruption. Tablets (namely, iPads given that's what 90% of the market actually owns) cost $500 apiece, are easily accessible, and let business owners demo point of sale systems software right on their device, instead of just placing a call to Micros/Aloha and making a call based on specs and feature checklists, when those feature checklists include a lot of convoluted features they won't end up using. The problem is, even with the revolution of availability in the space, given the poor purchasing experience with previous point of sale systems, most business owners are A) not very excited to have to purchase a point of sale and B) cannot possibly comprehend a point of sale that can run on commodity hardware. All sorts of silly questions regarding reliability crop up. But, I digress. Regarding payments, I think that point of sale developers regard it as just a necessary evil that we have to roll our eyes and hold our nose that we need to integrate these payment solutions. We end up writing integration for each payment processor themselves, and each of their unique XML/SOAP/what have you APIs instead of spending time on what we care about. I would love for a user-centric company like Square to come in and just offer a usable API, but that's not really their gig and it's a complex situation. Payments are in need of disruption, sure, but the first person to 'win' will be the one who decides they're not going to go completely vertical anymore, and has a nice, full, API with a good accounting/reporting web service to back it up. At that point, I can trust they're going to get my customers the best rates and widest acceptance possible, and I can easily write integration for them and push my customers their way. I could care less about this and that detail about slightly lower rates, or gift card programs, or cutting me .005 percent of each transaction. I just want to give my customers the tools to run their business correctly and accurately at the lowest possible development cost to myself.

by 18pfsmt 15y ago

refulgentis 15y ago

I firmly believe the POS space is ripe for some really intense disruption. Tablets (namely, iPads given that's what 90% of the market actually owns) cost $500 apiece, are easily accessible, and let business owners demo point of sale systems software right on their device, instead of just placing a call to Micros/Aloha and making a call based on specs and feature checklists, when those feature checklists include a lot of convoluted features they won't end up using. The problem is, even with the revolution of availability in the space, given the poor purchasing experience with previous point of sale systems, most business owners are A) not very excited to have to purchase a point of sale and B) cannot possibly comprehend a point of sale that can run on commodity hardware. All sorts of silly questions regarding reliability crop up. But, I digress. Regarding payments, I think that point of sale developers regard it as just a necessary evil that we have to roll our eyes and hold our nose that we need to integrate these payment solutions. We end up writing integration for each payment processor themselves, and each of their unique XML/SOAP/what have you APIs instead of spending time on what we care about. I would love for a user-centric company like Square to come in and just offer a usable API, but that's not really their gig and it's a complex situation. Payments are in need of disruption, sure, but the first person to 'win' will be the one who decides they're not going to go completely vertical anymore, and has a nice, full, API with a good accounting/reporting web service to back it up. At that point, I can trust they're going to get my customers the best rates and widest acceptance possible, and I can easily write integration for them and push my customers their way. I could care less about this and that detail about slightly lower rates, or gift card programs, or cutting me .005 percent of each transaction. I just want to give my customers the tools to run their business correctly and accurately at the lowest possible development cost to myself.