Dive Brief:
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Florida retailer City Furniture is working with Inegnico and IBM to upgrade its point of sale equipment with mobile capabilities in its City Furniture and Ashley Furniture HomeStore showrooms, according to an Ingenico Group press release.
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All of City Furniture’s stores have implemented Ingenico Group’s RP750x mobile point of sale (mPOS) card reader, which is paired with an iPad Pro via Bluetooth to run additional applications. The solution also uses Ingenico Group’s mPOS EMV Software Development Kit and Ingenico Decryption Web Service.
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Additional applications will come from IBM, which back in May announced it was rolling out three of its MobileFirst applications to City Furniture to allow the retailer’s 400 sales associates to streamline the in-store path to purchase.
Dive Insight:
It appears we're seeing the rest of City Furniture's in-store mobile story play out after the retailer initially embraced IBM's apps in May.
It makes sense for those apps to tie into mobile POS devices, and IBM itself offers mobile POS platforms (The technology giant was rumored a year ago to be discussing a buyout of mobile POS player Revel Systems, but that deal never happened.)
City Furniture is clearly embracing the use of mobile technology in its stores, something that 89% of retailers responding to a recent Boston Retail Partners survey said they would do within the next three years. Still, it's a major bet on the benefits of mobile technology for any kind of regional retailer to make.
Ingenico’s mPOS EMV SDK allows City Furniture to process any payment mode — including EMV chip-and-sign, EMV chip-and-PIN, magstripe and NFC/contactless — from anywhere in its store showrooms. The DWS allows every location to process City Furniture’s “Private Label” finance cards and City Furniture gift cards, Inegnico said. The RP750x mPOS also has a number of technical benefits, including the ability to support multi-layered security using point-to-point-encryption (P2PE).
City Furniture also suggested in the Ingenico press release that its mobile POS and in-store mobile app adoption is not a migration many of its competitors have chosen to take on yet. The ability to make some clear competitive differentiation might be the biggest benefit of the mobile investment.
