Traveling Vineyard, a direct marketer of wines through in-home wine tasting events, is looking to streamline its unique retail experience by integrating mobile payments.

The company is using CardFlight, a mobile point of sale technology provider, to enable their distributors to accept payments, including EMV chip card payments, from mobile devices. The development will keep the company competitive in a sector that, like many others, are migrating to ecommerce and mcommerce, led by delivery applications such as Minibar.

“When making purchases, 78% of consumers prefer to use a debit or credit card, while only 12% prefer to pay with cash or check,” said Derek Webster, CEO of CardFlight. “It’s important for direct selling companies like Traveling Vineyard to allow customers to pay with a credit card.

“Given that most consultants already have smartphones or tablets, it’s a natural extension for someone like Traveling Vineyard to give those representatives a customized mobile application and a lightweight mobile card reader so that they can take orders wherever they are.”

Mobile-enhanced
Traveling Vineyard has developed a proprietary iOS application to help Wine Guides plan and organize tastings. The application integrates CardFlight’s software development kit, encrypted mobile card readers and payment gateway.

Users then pay through CardFlight’s A200 card reader, which will allow Traveling Vineyard’s Wine Guides to accept  both magnetic stripe and EMV chip card payments by simply attaching the card reader to a smart phone or tablet and using the Traveling Vineyard application.

“Previously, Traveling Vineyard’s sales reps were using an off-the-shelf mobile swiper solution that was completely separate from Traveling Vineyard’s back-end order processing and customer management system, resulting in a flawed checkout process because distributors had to use multiple applications that weren’t integrated together, just to complete a sale,” Mr. Webster said. “Additionally, that solution didn’t have support for EMV chip cards which are now common in the United States.

“The new CardFlight-powered solution will increase sales through a frictionless checkout process and also reduce the risk of chargebacks and fraud losses because our solution is fully enabled to accept EMV chip cards.”

Smooth transition
The benefits to Traveling Vineyard and their consultants include making it fast and easy to complete a sale, reduced order abandonment, reduced credit card processing costs, and integration with Traveling Vineyard’s back-end provider for integrated analytics and reporting. Customers will benefit from being able to pay with credit card and not be burdened with carrying cash and checks.

“The key benefit of the CardFlight Software Developer Kit is that it allows someone to quickly and securely embed mobile payment acceptance within their own iOS and Android applications,” Mr. Webster said. “This allows payment acceptance to be integrated with everything else about a retailer’s workflow.

“Direct selling companies utilize sophisticated back-end platforms to manage sales and order processing,” he said. “Traditional retailers have CRM and ERP systems they are looking to integrate.

“Our solution has been used across a number of industries including retail, event management, transportation and charity fundraising.  The common thread is that CardFlight SDK customers are able to build their own custom applications, custom point-of-sale workflows, and tie together multiple back office systems, all with mobile payment acceptance seamlessly integrated.”