Holiday Queue Busting: Shortening Checkout Lines with Mobile Tap to Pay

The holiday season is here again, and consumers will soon be hitting department stores, malls and local businesses in droves. Like every year, the one thing everyone dreads is crowded aisles and long checkout lines. Lines that wrap around the corner and seem like they’ll never end are a reality every shopper knows to expect — a kind of nightmarish holiday tradition. 

But what if they didn’t have to be?

Thanks to the widespread adoption of contactless payments and mobile payment technologies like tap to pay becoming more mainstream, your merchants now have the opportunity to untether the checkout process from the front of the store. That allows customers to make their payments with any employee, anywhere on the sales floor. The result is shorter lines at the front cash register, faster checkouts, happier customers and higher sales.

Let’s look at why flexible checkout and line busting are so important to the customer journey and your merchants’ success, as well as how new systems like Tap-to-Pay for iPhone and Android are making it easier than ever to create a great holiday shopping experience.

In-store shopping still plays a major role in retail. During the pandemic, many expected the rapid acceleration toward ecommerce to become the “new normal.” Yet, a few years out, ecommerce growth is slowing, and 80% of 2024 holiday sales still happen in-store or through wholesale channels. Recent research from NMI also shows that the preference for in-store shopping is common across all age groups, including Gen Z who shop in-store just as often as their Millennial and Gen X counterparts.

However, more in-store shoppers means bigger crowds and longer lines, and that can be bad news for the overall shopping experience.

According to research from Waitwhile:

• As many as 70% of consumers associate waiting in line with negative emotions like frustration and annoyance
• Frustration with queues more than doubled from 2023 to 2024, suggesting many merchants weren’t ready for the surge in in-store shoppers
• Nearly two-thirds of consumers reported leaving a line before they’d reached the cash register
• 80% said they avoided businesses when they observed or even just anticipated long lines

In a tight economy where it’s a tooth-and-nail fight for consumer spending, it’s critical to address anything that adds friction at the point of sale — or, worse, keeps customers from walking in the door. And with Deloitte reporting that the average consumer already expects to spend 10% less this season, minimizing checkout friction will likely be a key part of your merchants’ holiday success.

Now for the good news: Shifting consumer preferences are making it possible to reduce congestion at the front checkout by eliminating the concept of a single, static checkout area altogether.

In its 2025 Consumer Holiday Spending Survey, The Strawhecker Group (TSG) found that 88% of urban consumers and 87% of suburban consumers had used a tap payment in the previous year, including in-store digital wallet payments. TSG also found that digital wallets are now being used by 61% of urban and 44% of suburban shoppers.

The overwhelming adoption of in-store tap payments and digital wallets means merchants are no longer tethered to traditional countertop point-of-sale systems (POS), thanks to the explosion of mobile-first options, including mobile POS (mPOS), software POS (SoftPOS) and tap to pay systems.

Mobile payments mean merchants can arm employees with technology that allows them to scan items, take payments and issue receipts anywhere in-store. That accomplishes three goals:

1. It gives customers more freedom in choosing how and where they pay, enabling tap-first shoppers to avoid the checkout line 
2. It relieves congestion at the front of the store, so shoppers who still prefer a traditional experience can get to the front of the line quicker
3. It improves the quality of the shopping experience for everyone and boosts customer satisfaction

Mobile payment devices are making it easier than ever to reduce checkout friction and shorten and speed up lines — a process known as queue busting or line busting. The two primary mobile checkout options your merchants have for queue busting are mPOS and SoftPOS systems.

mPOS: mPOS systems use a mobile wireless terminal connected to a tablet or traditional POS that lives in the main checkout area. Their main strength is their ability to offer free roaming, sales-floor-based payments while still maintaining the look and feel of a traditional payments device — a factor that can make customers more comfortable when paying away from the cash register.

Tap to Pay: SoftPOS systems, also known as tap to pay, eliminate the specialized hardware altogether and turn a merchant’s mobile devices into fully Europay, Mastercard and Visa (EMV) compliant, contactless payment pads. Using an easy-to-install app and a smartphone’s built-in near-field communication (NFC) capabilities, tap to pay allows the customer to tap their contactless card or digital wallet directly on the merchant’s device to pay.

Tap to pay is a particularly good option for small merchants because it offers two key benefits over mPOS:

1. Eliminates the need for specialized hardware or external payment devices, significantly lowering upfront costs
2. Uses a familiar smartphone interface, reducing training time and simplifying troubleshooting for employees

On the flip side, some less techy consumers may not be familiar with the idea of secure card-to-device or device-to-device tap payments, which can cause some initial discomfort. Employees also may not want to use their personal devices (and probably shouldn’t anyway), which means the business will need to provide phones. 

However, used smartphones are typically less expensive and more easily available than specialized payments hardware, and many of your merchants might already have one or two sitting in a drawer at home.

Mobile checkout solutions, like NMI Tap to Pay, allow employees on the sales floor to check out customers from anywhere in the store. That creates a network of floating checkout points that reduces congestion at the front counter and increases overall customer satisfaction. That kind of frictionless mobile checkout could make a huge difference for your merchants as we enter the 2025 holiday season.

To make it as easy as possible for your merchants to streamline their checkouts this holiday season, NMI offers a full suite of mobile options (including Tap to Pay) for both Android and iOS devices. For merchants looking for the simplicity and smartphone-like feel of pure tap to pay in a more purpose-built payments device, we also offer a hybrid solution in the Landi M20S.

To find out more about how NMI Tap to Pay can help your merchants deliver a better experience to holiday shoppers in 2025 and beyond, reach out to a member of our team today.