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The arms race in the tablet-based point-of-sale market heated up on Friday with Zing’s launch of its Register application. Built for Apple Inc.’s iPad, the software-as-a-service product includes integrations with e-commerce platform Bigcommerce and email-marketing provider MailChimp on top of the expected payment-processing services.
Further integrations with Intuit Inc.’s QuickBooks accounting software and with Constant Contact Inc., another email marketing firm, are expected shortly, Zack Angelo, chief technology officer at Austin, Texas-based Zing, tells Digital Transactions News. Also coming later will be versions of Register for Android, Mac, and Windows devices.
The launch of Register is part of a steady movement among tablet POS vendors toward automating multiple business-management functions for retail clients. Providers including Square Inc., the first company to provide payment service on an iPad, have added accounting, inventory-management, loyalty, and other key services recently.
But Zing says it is distinguishing itself by building the integrations itself rather than leaving them to the partner companies or to outside developers. “We know how to do it, the merchant doesn’t, and we don’t want partners to do that,” says Nate Stewart, chief executive of 4-year-old Zing, which until recently was known as Zing Checkout.
This approach, Stewart argues, gives Zing more control over programming, resulting in smoother data flows and fewer glitches for merchants. But developing such integrations internally can be time-consuming. Stewart says Zing spent 10 months building out its Bigcommerce connection to let merchants move inventory and sales data in real time between physical and Web stores. “We’re trying to eliminate as much work as possible for the merchant,” he says.
Some 15 merchants signed up for the beta version of Register before its launch. Zing can now market the application more widely to the 6,000 merchants that use the older Zing Checkout product. For payments, merchants must already have established a merchant account, but then can tap into seven integrated gateways, including PayPal Inc.’s PayFlow, Authorize.net, USAePay, Merchant Warehouse, Mercury Payments, First Data, and Clearent.
Pricing for Register runs from $49 per month up to $129 monthly, depending on how many stores and how many integrations a client wants. The low-end price covers one store and one integration, for example, while the high-end price pays for up to five locations and four integrations. The fees cover an unlimited number of sales checkouts at each location, but run higher if merchants want monthly rather than annual billing.
Adil Moussa, who follows merchant acquiring with Omaha, Neb.-based Adil Consulting, says Zing is on the right track, but he adds a cautionary note that getting ahead in the tablet arms race may not be enough. Providers must also specialize to meet the unique needs of merchants in separate markets.
“Trying to sell a solution like this is very hard if Zing is not segmenting the market into verticals, creating vertical-specific communication/marketing in order to appeal to merchants,” Moussa says in an email message. “Otherwise, we are too familiar with the failure of companies even with great technology because in their trying to appeal to all merchants, they ended up attracting nobody.”
In other mobile news, PayPal announced that Amazon.com has included the PayPal app on its App Store for download to the Amazon Fire smart phone, which went on sale Friday. As with the iOS and Android versions, the version for Fire allows PayPal users to check balances, check in with merchants to pay, and find and redeem offers, along with other features.
Amazon unveiled the Fire smart phone last month, pricing it at $199 to start with an AT&T contract.
