SalonPay Brings Mobile Payments to the Barber’s Chair

It may come as a surprise afterthought to some—it definitely did to me—but salons and similar applications are kind of behind the curve in terms of mobile payments. Still often cash-heavy—sometimes cash-only—operations, beauty salons, barber shops and spas haven’t often made advances in mobile payments and similar systems. That may be about to change with a recently-announced partnership between iSalon Software and Cardstream, news of which was sent our way.

With the new partnership came SalonPay, a complete mobile payments solution geared toward those various service businesses. Considered an industry first, SalonPay actually represents a rebranding of a white-label payment solution—which is in part what white-label solutions were meant for—and offers its users access to not only mobile payments, but also online payments and payments for the in-store point of sale.

Perhaps better yet for the retailer, it also gathers transaction information and allows that data to be used later to make determinations about what services are popular enough to keep and which should be dropped. There’s even secure tokenization in place allowing the transactions to be carried out with comparative safety.

Managing director of iSalon Darren Pick noted “We spent considerable time with our customers to gain a clear view of the payment solution that would best suit their needs. SalonPay is our response. A simple, quick and reliable omnichannel service for collecting credit and debit card payments in-salon, online and via mobile phones.” Pick also noted how valuable customer data is, and how SalonPay would help gather customer data for later analysis, a point that should be especially valuable later.

It’s no secret by now that analytics has a real potential to help businesses succeed. Incorporating analytics capabilities into a mobile payments system is a smart idea in general; mobile payments are convenient for customers, and convert all that data into useful form for later. Want to tell which haircuts are the most popular? Want to prove that no one’s really going for the waxing options? Do you really need a new massage therapist? All of these can be found out readily just by studying the records, and a system like SalonPay makes the records easier to find later.

Mobile payments are great by themselves, but mobile payments combined with analytics is even better.