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Venue operator Live Nation Entertainment will install more than 4,400 fixed and mobile point-of-sale devices supplied by cloud-based mobile point-of-sale maker Appetize in 32 venues, Appetize announced Tuesday.
Four-year-old Appetize says this is its largest single POS deployment yet. About half of the devices in the Live Nation deal involve Apple Inc.’s iPod Touch and iPad Mini devices, Kevin Anderson, Appetize co-founder and vice president of business development, tells Digital Transactions News. “About 50% were fixed iPad POS terminals,” Anderson says. He declined to disclose the value of the project.
All 4,400 devices were installed in 60 days, he says. All of the devices rely on WiFi for their connectivity, enabling the venue management to more easily increase POS services than if the devices relied on wired Ethernet connectivity, Anderson says.
The devices accept magnetic-stripe, EMV credit and debit, and Apple Pay transactions, and have Bluetooth and RFID capabilities.
The massive terminalization program, which replaced traditional POS systems, was aided by the now-familiar touch interface and the use of Excel data files to upload all of the available products for each location, Anderson says. “On average we had about four days of on-site support to launch each venue,” he says. Often that was a two-person project, he added.
Los Angeles-based Appetize specializes in large enterprise POS projects, Anderson says. “Our stance is the legacy guys haven’t innovated and the mobile POS has really focused on the individual site, the one-off coffee shop.”
Anderson says Appetize sells direct, with a focus on sports, entertainment, leisure, and education businesses. Merchants can use their existing payment processor, but must send the transaction through the Appetize gateway, Anderson says. That enables detailed data reporting so a business can have a better understanding of transactions.
