Contactless
Tap-to-pay over NFC, whether from a card or from a phone wallet. From the terminal’s point of view a contactless card and a phone are the same transaction; from the shopper’s they are the fastest way through a queue.
Why it matters to a merchant
The reason queue length is now a payments question. Contactless changed the time per transaction enough that high-volume, low-value trades — coffee, convenience, transport-adjacent retail — reorganised their counters around it. For those merchants, terminal choice is partly a throughput decision rather than purely a cost one.
Where this comes up
Pages on this site that deal with this in context:
Related terms
In this section: At the counter