What Would an Apple Point-of-Sale Look Like? How Far Would Apple Go?
Square, one of the most popular payment platforms, offers products that turn iPhone and iPad into POS (point-of-sale) terminals. The company has a great app that lets vendors use iOS devices to keep track of all their sales. Specifically speaking of the iPad, there are also very well built accessories to place it as a POS terminal in stores.
Yup, Square makes good products, and merchants demand top-class POS apps.
Just imagine if Apple had its own POS system integrated with Apple Pay and built into an NFC-enabled iPad. That would be killer.
Color me very skeptical that Apple is going to release contactless payments on the iPhone, add NFC and contactless to the iPad, ship a stand to prop up the iPad in your store, a card reader for all those non-contactless folks, build out a full-fledged POS app, and become a PayFac who will take on the risk of merchants and deal with payouts…
Oh, and e-commerce! What if a merchant has a website? They’ll need to have a whole other merchant account for that? If so, then why split your reporting over two accounts and pay more fees when you could do it all in one place?
I continue to think this will be a feature of Apple Pay and you’ll see apps from NMI (that’s me 😉), Stripe, Square, etc. adopt this into their existing POS solutions.