TapTouch Retail Embedded Payments (Android) — payment connector

TapTouch Retail Embedded Payments (Android) is not a point-of-sale system — it is the payment connector that joins a point-of-sale system to the terminal, through Tyro. The retail counterpart of Taptouch's embedded payments — card acceptance inside the Android POS app rather than through a separate terminal.

Worth being clear about what this is, because the directories list it alongside the tills: you do not buy this instead of a point-of-sale system, you buy it to connect one you already have.

This is a payment connector rather than a point of sale: the embedded payments component for the retail build of Taptouch on Android, from Ivida Smart Technologies Pty Ltd. Embedded means the card is taken by the POS application on the device itself, instead of the till passing an amount to a standalone terminal beside it. One device, one transaction.

For a retailer the appeal is a single mobile unit you can take to the customer anywhere in the shop — useful for queue-busting, for bulky goods, for pop-ups and markets. The cost of that is flexibility: embedded payments tie you more tightly to the vendor's payment arrangement, so ask what switching acquirer involves, and whether you can still fall back to a separate terminal if the device fails on a Saturday. Also worth asking what happens to the sale when the device drops off the network mid-payment.

Taptouch builds its own hardware, including an 11-inch detachable tablet and a dual-screen counter unit, and says it runs in over 4,000 venues across Australia, the UK, New Zealand and the Netherlands. Software plans run from free up to around $165 plus GST a month.