Openbravo New Release Helps Boost Customer Satisfaction at the POS With Self-Checkout and Mobile Payments

Is your POS system giving customers what they want? The rise in mobile payments and the growing popularity of customer self-service are two recent trends that retailers cannot afford to ignore.

Fortunately, the latest release of Openbravo Commerce Cloud (18Q1) makes it easy to add mobile payment and self-checkout capabilities,  so improving the shopping experience for customers that visit your stores.

Self-checkout is increasingly common and a growing number of retailers have at least one checkout lane where you can scan your items and pay for your purchases without the help of a store employee.

The benefits of self-checkout are two-fold:  you need less employees working the checkouts, so you can save on wages and training costs; and customer wait times are reduced, so your customer satisfaction increases.

Openbravo Commerce Cloud’s new self-checkout solution (SCO) leverages the Openbravo Web POS infrastructure but uses a newly designed user interface that is intuitive for customers to use.

The systems allows an assistant to switch between SCO and the standard Web POS interface and preserve all the information. For a detailed explanation of SCO consult the technical information.

Rise of mobile payments

Mobile payments also have many advantages. They are increasingly popular with customers, they modernize the in-store experience, and they may encourage shoppers to spend more.

A new module in this latest release of Openbravo Commerce Cloud.offers integrated support for Alipay and WeChat, two of the most popular Chinese mobile payment solutions.

Unlike many mobile payment systems, these two Chinese systems do not require the customer to have an NFC-enabled mobile phone. Instead, the consumer can use any smartphone to scan a QR code that is generated on POS screen when they make a purchase in a store. Alternatively, the retailer can scan a barcode on the customer’s mobile phone.

The ease of use of these two systems has led to an explosion in mobile payments in China but whatever technology you choose to support, retailers have much to gain from accepting mobile payments.

More improvements in  this new release

The new Openbravo Commerce Cloud release (18Q1) includes functional improvements in other areas. There are more options for searching all types of orders based on multiple search parameters, and there are improvements in Openbravo Web POS offline operation, which is particularly relevant to retailers operating in regions where network connectivity is unreliable.

In addition, the new software release offers the possibility of deploying high availability scenarios along with the new Cloud offering. This will provide greater flexibility for those retailers interested in an extra level of system reliability and performance.

To find out more about mobile payments, read our blogpost or watch our on-demand webinar, “Choosing the Right Mobile Payments Strategy for your Retail Business.“