One of the hardest parts of the payments universe is increasing transaction speed and reducing friction for the consumer. Let’s be realistic, we have gone from paying with cash to using a mobile phone in a very short time, but the last five years have brought significant change. In the...
Defend Against Dollar Stores: C-stores can protect their turf against value retailers by focusing on strengths and differentiation
This article originally appeared in a print edition of Convenience Store News, written by contributor Tammy Mastroberte. Convenience Store News' online content can be found here. Convenience Store Operators face competition from within the industry, as well as outside of it. This includes quick-service restaurants, drugstores and the expanding dollar...
Touchpoints: The New Point of Sale
The following has been reposted from Convenience Store Decisions. The original post can be found here. New touchpoints are challenging traditional point-of-sale (POS) systems used in the convenience/petro retail industry, as customer-experience-driven technologies, global solution providers and industry leaders look to move their companies forward. For example, as more convenience...
Generational Consumer Preferences: What Does It Mean for Your Business?
We hear it all the time – “Millennials are killing ___”, with any number of products or services filling in the blank. Millennials are currently the largest generation of spenders, and will continue to be for at least the next 10 years [1]. For merchants, this means that the...
What Happened to Cryptocurrency?
In early 2018, in an email to a colleague, I wrote this about cryptocurrency, and it remains prescient even today: “Regardless of when this is being read, the cryptocurrency market will have wildly shifted within the last few days. As cryptocurrency remains prevalent in the news, merchants and all others...
The Evolving Data Revolution
The following has been reposted from Convenience Store Decisions. The original post can be found here. Not so long ago, scan data meant monitoring how many of which items sold. It gave category managers a new response to vendors using purchase data to allocate shelf space. It relieved store employees from...
Visa and MasterCard Offer Rules Changes
The following article comes to us courtesy of Brian Kehn from HomeServeUSA, and describes rule changes that are current as of August 12, 2019. Visa and MasterCard have new rules related to merchants who provide introductory offers, up-sells and free trial offers that turn into an ongoing subscription. The program...
Move Aside, CCPA?
It’s been about 2 months since we have posted about data privacy, and with the speed in which this ever-changing topic moves, that is far overdue. This article will highlight some of the latest developments in data privacy, including the scope of the legislation in Maine, Nevada, and New York,...
Mitigating Mobile Fraud via Machine Learning
Many retailers have been making the shift towards applications that allow users to shop and pay for products directly through their phones. This modern way of transacting creates new avenues for tech-savvy fraudsters to benefit. There are many ways to fraud a mobile payment app; reinstallation, dummy emails, multiple devices,...
Circumventing Mobile Fraud Protections
With many payment channels, bad actors seek to take advantage of vulnerabilities to secure goods or funds at little to no cost to them; the same holds true for mobile payment applications. With each merchant mobile app implementation, different combinations and permutations of entry points for fraudsters arise, and in...
Agile Project Delivery – How Do I Know If It’s Right For My Organization?
The retail world is changing more rapidly than ever, and organizations need to deliver solutions to market faster than at any point in history. This need has driven a push to adopt Agile delivery methodologies such as Scrum, Lean and Kanban. What are the benefits and drawbacks of migrating toward...
EMV 3DS – Going to the store? Not really!
From the first moment that humanity started to identify its primary needs, it was clear that many tasks required more than one individual to complete them. The first humans had to make teams, organize, and eventually, exchange with other teams… So began payment transactions. Many years later, money was invented;...
