Remember when your only option to pay for products at the grocery store was Cash, Check or credit card? Well more and more customers these days are keeping their cards in their wallets and paying with their favorite smart device. Seems a bit futuristic in some respects, but the future is quite literally now in the payments industry.

The credit card payment industry has gone through a mini-revolution the past few years with the liability shift requirement to EMV (Europay Mastercard Visa) in 2015 and with the advent of more powerful smartphone technology capable of facilitating this type of payment method, largely in 2014 with the birth of ApplePay. The advantage most consumers point to in utilizing this technology is using a smartphone to pay is quite more secure than a standard magstripe card. The magstripe card technology is largely unchanged since over the past 50 years and the tactics to duplicate card is easy and cheap. Another plus is that the customer’s credit cards can be managed on the easy-to-navigate card interface, easily allowing different cards to be selected at the customer’s leisure.

Over the past 3 years since its inception, more and more midsize to large retailers are upgrading their equipment to satisfy their tech-savvy customer’s request to be able to accept NFC (Near Field Communication) payments, of which include ApplePay and its closest competitors, AndroidPay and SamsungPay. While the card is still king is most retail settings, the contactless payment methods are definitely improving their adoption rate every day, especially among the millennial customer base that begins to get their own cards.

How can small-midsize retailers get ready to accept NFC payments without incurring high set-up fees? Getting the proper equipment in place is certainly a step in the right direction. Most newer terminals are NFC-Capable out of the box with the payment method baked into the terminal’s software/hardware or are capable of accepting the payment with a Pin Pad that has the NFC built into the solution. At Pineapple Payments, we offer terminals capable of accepting these NFC payments, as well as protecting the merchant and customers with products injected with the CardSecure tokenization & encryption service offered by CardConnect. Our devices not only are secure and have cutting-edge technology built in, but can also automatically pass LII and LIII data automatically with every transaction without extra line items to be input.

What’s next for payment acceptance technology? Really, the sky is the limit. 50 Years ago when the magstripe credit card was introduced by Diner’s Club and American Express, I’m sure people never believed that you would eventually be able to pay for your groceries with your telephone. Paying biometrically with your eyes, fingerprints, facial features or other futuristic device in the future wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest; but then again your friends at Pineapple Payments will always be there to show you how to accept those payments to keep your processing fresh.