3 Big Numbers is a weekly column that looks at key details in the convenience-store industry.
While there can be many upsides to convenience store expansion, one of the downsides can come in the form of fragmented payment technology.
Retailers may acquire stores that use a different fuel pump or in-store point-of-sale system. Or maybe they decide to integrate a new technology solution when they open a fresh design, but don’t have the cash to retrofit that solution into older locations.
The state of these technology kaleidoscopes became the topic of a recent study from retail tech company Vontier on unified payments.
In this week’s “3 Big Numbers” we explore that study to understand the picture it paints of the state of c-store payments tech.
75%
The percent of c-store operators with a fragmented payment architecture.
According to the report, which surveyed representatives of companies from single-store operators to major multi-state chains, 75% of the industry is dealing with a fragmented payments system.
Additionally, half of respondents had at least four different outdoor terminals while a third had four or more different indoor terminals.
That means that if a retailer wanted to accept a new form of payment or to add to its loyalty program, it would have to make sure those changes worked across all those different vendors. That could potentially add to the time and expense of the change.
88%
The number of retailers that have had at least one payment outage in the past year.
The unfortunate truth is that while technology can make things easier and improve access to information, it can also fail.
The report found that 88% of respondents had experienced at least one service outage in the past year, with 36% saying they had been hit with three or more in that timeframe.
When retailers have multiple payment technologies, they face an increased likelihood of outages since they would be affected if any of those solutions encountered problems. But if all stores are on the same system, an outage could take down the whole network, so there are downsides to both sides of the coin.
$100,000
The low end of the median range for the cost of updating payments to a unified system.
While there are benefits to unifying payments tech, it also comes with costs — of the monetary sort, among others.
Vontier’s survey found that the median budget for upgrading to a unified payments platform was $100,000 to $250,000. Depending on a retailer’s income, that could be a big chunk of change.
Despite the cost, 27% said they’re looking to make the change, and 57% said they’d be willing to invest in the next 12 months if the return on investment was clear.
