While this blog has touched on many reasons why a smart phone and tablet payment solutions can benefit a business, there is one that is not often considered and it is a major selling point of the technology. It involves the use of mobile devices to get through the downtimes of a traditional point of sale solution.

Imagine being open for business when a storm rolls through that knocks out the power for an extended period of time. Without electricity for example, merchants may decide to only accept cash for purchases or revert to manual imprinter machines and carbon sales drafts as back up, either taking risk that transactions won't be approved later or calling to obtain a voice authorization for each card transaction.  The emergence of mobile devices for payment acceptance is providing a compelling alternative back up solution.

A recent blog post from ROAM examined how smart phones and tablets can help businesses keep their doors open even if the power goes out, the internet goes down or if there is a hardware failure with the POS, cash register or bankcard terminal. Using mobile payment technologies can help maintain customer satisfaction and avoid lost sales even when your organization is dealing with something that is anything but ordinary.

"Leveraging a secure mobile card reader and an mPOS application, employees can gain a sure fire way to continue accepting payments in case a store's POS system goes down," the article reads. "And if the business happens to lose wireless connection, a merchant can still accept offline transactions if they're using an advanced mPOS solution."

Mobile devices as a back up payment solution can serve as an inexpensive contingency plan for keeping the doors open in a crisis.  By partnering with a payment solution provider, any company can turn their Smartphone or tablet into an emergency system.