Street Fight Summit West: Clover Talks Tablet Power

Cloud-fed Tablets are powerful, game changing tools for SMB payment processing, marketing and promotion. That’s the view of Clover Co-President Leonard Speiser, who was speaking this week at The Street Fight Summit West conference in San Francisco. Clover is a company that provides cloud-based processing solutions for SMBs.

Tablets have “all the power of the POS,” provide “the plug and play services that business’ want,” and represent “a mass change of economics,” says Speiser. He notes that they only cost a few hundred dollars compared to cost of a typical POS system, which is closer to $1,500 but widely varies.

The switch to tablets, however, hasn’t really happened yet, even in tech-saturated San Francisco, where Clover is based. Speiser notes that if he were to survey the 50 or so businesses on his Castro St. block, “just one has moved to a tablet.”

One reason for the slow adoption rate is that SMBs are still determining which features are really important to them, beyond processing –and what they will actually implement. Customer Analytics makes sense for customers and are included in most tablet solutions today, he notes. But 50 percent of SMBs signing up never set them up.

The top feature request are actually theft alerts — not the kind of thing that Clover has in mind for its marketing solutions. Speiser says that his reps are always hearing the same thing: “I think people are stealing from me.”