Big Retailer's New Clunky Attempt To Kill Apple Pay And Credit Card Fees

[Xithras]

6. The real problem...

...is that retailers are getting tired of dealing with the Silicon Valley's utter inability to design a common, effective payment system. Paypal, ApplePay, Google Wallet, Softcard, Amazon Payments, and about half a dozen startups are now competing for space and support on POS terminals. Retailers, on the other hand, have been saying for MANY years that they simply want one technology that works for everyone, so they can keep things (and costs) as low as possible. They thought they had a solution with Paypal, but the decline of Ebay's soon to be spun-off payment system left many retailers holding the bag and swallowing millions of dollars in losses over wasted implementation costs. Home Depot, as one example, spent millions implementing and deploying Paypal support to all of its retail locations, but actual sales using the system have been abysmal, and they supposedly have not even recovered the original implementation costs yet. The retailers are getting burned, and are no longer interested in supporting fad technologies.

What many of the tech companies have utterly failed to realize is that "the customer is always right", and the customer, in this case, is the RETAILERS, and not the people who are buying and using their mobile phones or downloading their apps. You can design the best consumer payment system in the world, but if the retailers won't spend the money to implement it (and widescale POS upgrades in retail chains can cost tens of millions of dollars...or more, in the biggest retailers), then the tech isn't going anywhere. The stores have been demanding "universal, cheap, and fast", and Silicon Valley has responded by fragmenting further and demanding that the retailers support ever more complicated payment systems and expensive hardware. They wanted the ability to integrate payments with their own apps, and were utterly ignored by the tech companies. They wanted the ability to tie payments into their customer loyalty programs and to link in payments via gift cards or store branded credit cards (which pass along lower...or no...fees to the retailer), and the tech companies weren't interested.

MCX launched the CurrentC project (backed by a huge list of retailers) because the retailers are tired of waiting for the techies to get their act together and offer a product that fit their demands. What the Silicon Valley inventors failed to realize is that multi-billion dollar corporations aren't retail consumers, and aren't going to patiently wait around while the techies try to figure out how to put an effective system together. They aren't going to implement a dozen iterations of various fad technologies while the Valley tried to figure out which one to standardize on. The retailers, with their deep pockets and total control of the POS terminals, have simply decided to cut the techies out of the loop and come up with their own solution. It's hard to fault the retailers for that.