Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

What’s so hard about using mobile devices in-store? Apple and Home Depot are already doing it. Nordstrom is kicking around ideas. Although most retailers are already deep into mobile commerce—where customers use their phones to buy when they’re outside a store—few are flipping that scenario so that associates use mobile in-store, especially as POS devices. The problem, according to one retail IT exec: In-store mobile generates a dizzying array of options, and picking through them all seems next to impossible.

As that exec pointed out in a recent conversation, “Mobile POS is all trendy and cool right now, but it may not be the right answer to your problem.” On the other hand, the possibilities don’t have to be endless, especially if you start from what it’s practical for mobile devices to do in your stores instead of starting with a device and imagining the possibilities.

Maybe you’re trying to handle overflow from checkout lanes at the busiest times, the exec suggested. That means associates armed with mobile devices could cherry-pick just the customers whose purchases can be handled well by a mobile device. Compare that approach to replacing big cash-wrap stations so you can reclaim chunks of the sales floor: Now associates have to do everything that’s possible at a full-scale cash wrap.

In-store mobile gets a lot simpler if all you’re doing is sending associates out to roam the store doing suggestive selling or accepting returns only at the door on the way in. If your main goal is to look as cool as the guys in the Apple Store, things can get showy—and complicated—mighty fast.

If you’re doing mobile POS, you’d really like to repurpose your existing POS application. That is (relatively) easy if you can just run the user interface on the handheld, but it’s much more complicated if you must re-create the whole application on the mobile device. And what about payments? Swiping a credit card is easy these days. PIN debit gets trickier. Checks and cash are a nightmare.

A mobile POS device has to communicate securely with the store’s Wi-Fi in a PCI-approved way. Loss-prevention gets a whole new meaning when a thief (or a bad-apple associate) can walk out of the store with a device containing your Wi-Fi passwords, your POS application and—if you’ve been sloppy—a collection of recent payment-card transactions.

A mobile device could also be used just to tally up a customer’s purchases, after which the customer would have to pay at a kiosk or in a regular checkout lane. That’s simpler, right? But that approach only speeds things up if the associate with the mobile device can also bag the goods, deactivate loss-prevention tags and collect clothes hangers.

Where does the associate carry all that stuff?