A well known giant in the IT and consulting space carried out the 2014 North America Shopper Funds Survey with a pattern size of 4000, in order to understand and anticipate the forthcoming modifications in the mode of payment desirered by customers when they check out of retail stores. The outcomes of the survey are startling enough to function a wake-up call for the honchos of organized retail, especially for those who are certain enough that information analytics is the only area they need to make investments focus on.
By 2020, it is expected that 18% of the consumers who were part of the survey are likely to use Bitcoins and different digital currencies for paying their payments at level-of-sale or POS counters. More importantly, 40% of those who have been surveyed gave an affirmative reply when asked if they had made at least one cost by utilizing their smartphones in final seven days or so, which was a meager 16% back in 2012. All these statistics unmistakably indicate the gradually growing global development of diminished utilization of money, credit cards and debit cards - devices of financial exchange that dominate the POS transactions throughout the world.
Demographic evaluation of the info collected throughout survey means that people born within the late Nineteen Eighties or later are leading the trend. A new breed of customers has emerged with gross annual family income surpassing $a hundred and fifty,000 and they don't seem to be reluctant to flush retail shops with digital currencies throughout payment. The truth is, among the customers belonging to the high-revenue group, 19% have adopted digital currencies because the chosen mode for transacting at POS counters. Because of this, it's anticipated that by the top of this decade, cash funds will be reduced by 12%, accompanied by a slump of 6% and 3% for debit cards and credit cards respectively - demonstrating a decline in the reputation of plastic money for the first time in 50 years.
Most certainly, high executives of every big name within the organized retail sector are grappling with a number of issues. With the specter of dropping competitive edge in alluring the younger and tech-savvy shopper section that is cash rich, additionally comes the cost-profit ratio of investing on futuristic fee acceptance mechanisms. When nearly all of customers with modest spending power are nonetheless fairly consolationable with typical methods, determination makers are facing the dilemma of prioritizing one phase over the other.
Nonetheless, as with different cases of common folks adapting to new applied sciences, there may be also a flip side that must be considered. According to specialists, the broad scale availability of POS hardware and software that may facilitate cost through the use of smartphones is a big question. The hardware, being manufactured by a handful of firms, will hit the market pretty quickly in a coherent manner. Alternatively, innumerable big and small
billing software companies that codes normal as properly customized POS software for retail outlets must begin from the scratch, merely because of the hardware compatibility issues. Since that is an emerging genre of technology that's yet to be embraced by the mass, there shall be disparity concerning the packaging and pricing of software. Consequently, it is not going to be possible for retailers to simultaneously install and preserve each the types - the one that favors mobile payment and the opposite, which is commonplace. Thus, for average retailers, the conventional transaction strategies will nonetheless bear the same significance.