Checkout’s Unattended Future

Simplifying and streamlining checkout is an industry obsession, and it’s going to get more intense as retailers recognize the importance of the checkout experience to shoppers.

Speaking with PYMNTS for our “Executive Insights Series – The Next Three Years,” Kristjan Johannsson, chief commercial officer at LS Retail, an Aptos Company, said the three-year focus for the point-of-sale (POS) solution provider is continued development of unified commerce platforms, the continuation of the company’s cloud-based SaaS transformation and more work on improving unattended retail solutions.

With a massive footprint of over 90,000 stores from retail to pharmacies in more than 157 countries, including major clients such as Adidas, Starbucks, and Victoria’s Secret, to name a few, LS Retail sees a unified future for the POS function across verticals — and devices.

“We are highly focused on providing our customers with a cross-device approach,” Johannsson said, “so from POS to mobile or whatever device the customer is using, and also the channel, supporting all channels so it can be online or offline in any way the customer wants to approach the store, we can support those processes.”

As retail changes post-pandemic, POS integrations that make new store features and configurations possible are also a focus for LS Retail’s client list, as they are for all merchants.

Johannsson described a common scenario wherein a retailer wants to add a food or coffee offering to a retail location. Doing so gets easier with a unified POS approach that works from the core retail operation to the ancillary offerings — like coffee — that many are adding.

“We both support the retail part of their operation, but also the hospitality part, all in one solution,” he said.

Pharmacy is another area where LS Retail is bringing unified POS to bear. In this case, it’s common for one software solution to be used for complicated prescription processing and a separate POS for over-the-counter medical items and retail products, often handled by a different solution.

“We are able to do this in the same solution as a unified offering and helping the store, a pharmacy, in this case, to run this in a much smoother process,” he said.

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The SaaS Transformation

Cloud-based POS and SaaS are a major focus for many operators now, and with LS Retail’s foundation being the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central solution, it’s tapping more deeply into the processing power of Azure cloud computing to realize its unified vision.

“The velocity of our customers transforming to SaaS has been really increasing during the last year,” he said. “As we see it now, this is going to happen during the next three years. Most of our customers will move, and all new customers will opt-in, for the SaaS version” of LS Central, its retail management software, as well as its specialized POS offerings for enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Unattended retail innovation is very much on the company’s three-year roadmap as well, as retailers of all types retool for speed and convenience from order to checkout.

“The pandemic set the scene for this and really pushed the R&D on our side, and many of our competitors,” Johannsson said. “We have invested in the scan and scale self-checkout solutions, which are typically in the grocery area, but also coming more and more into specialty stores and more retailers are wanting to use this.”

It’s not just the pandemic aftereffects but consumer demand driving these innovations. Pointing to Amazon Scan and Go “just walk out” payments as a kind of north star here, Johannsson said, “When you have an app where you can do the shopping, you can do the scanning, and you can check out yourself through your phone without anybody in the store interfering or assisting you in any way,” consumers increasingly prefer to do it themselves.

LS Retail has taken a similar step, embedding its unattended POS functionality into its SaaS software, in effect turning smartphones into POS terminals. “Our POS functionality is now in the phone of the customer,” he said. “They just need to register and identify themselves. We see a lot of interest in this … in the grocery area because they are providing 24/7 small stores close to railway stations, etc. This is a trend that we see clearly coming out.”

New Markets, New Approaches

As for other strategic maneuvers on a three-year timeline, LS Retail sees the potential to continue the digital transformation of restaurant ordering and payment via cloud-based mobile POS.

“We see this in the hospitality area, and in restaurants where we have seen these QR codes on the tables,” Johannsson said. “You go on the website of the restaurant, you make your order there, you can even pay there, and the waiter gets the notification when the food is ready to bring it to table number seven or whatever.”

These scenarios, born out of pandemic necessity, will continue to be refined and advanced as he said providing and supporting contactless shopping has use cases into the future, and certainly over the next three years.

This will benefit emerging markets as much or more than established ones, as Johannsson spoke about the outlook for new geographies as they adopt unified POS in all its forms.

“We see some of these areas growing faster than others. We are making a lot of progress in countries in Africa. We have a number of new customers in groceries in Africa. We see also areas like Indochina where you are looking at Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, and these kinds of countries. There’s a growing demand for our solutions in these areas,” he said.