From Oktoberfest to Autumn Sales, Retailers are Using Always-On POS

Germany's famous Oktoberfest is in full swing, with over 3.5 million visitors descending on Munich's Theresienwiese field. By the time the last Maß has been poured on October 5th, the organizers expect to have welcomed over six million guests (around four times the population of Munich). Dating back to 1810, Oktoberfest is a distillation of Bavarian identity and folk history – the food, music, clothing, and participating breweries have remained largely unchanged since the first edition.

While the focus may be on tradition, managing 500,000 daily visitors is a high-tech operation – from crowd management to payments, the folksy trappings of the modern-day festival are underpinned by increasingly sophisticated IT services. Managing growing visitor numbers in the modern day requires new technological developments.

Unusually for an event of this scale, the Munich festival’s reverence for the old ways extends to payments: nearly a third of the beer tents are still cash only. In recent years, however, card payments have been on the rise as merchants race to meet customer demand and embrace the benefits of contactless payments and wireless point of sale (POS) systems.

Events merchants are increasingly seeking new, faster ways to take payment and manage queues. Frankfurt's Oktoberfest is now a completely cashless event, echoing a wider trend at the world’s biggest festivals, including Tomorrowland and Coachella. Managing payments during crowded events is a continual challenge, fraught with connectivity concerns and queues.

For retailers and hospitality businesses, events like Oktoberfest offer an unprecedented opportunity to build revenue after the summer festival crowds give way to the pre-Christmas shopping period.

Seizing seasonal shopping opportunities

Like music festivals this summer, retailers are finding new ways to address the fall shoppers. Organizers and retailers are incorporating new developments in 5G and wireless payment technology to make the most of the autumn crowds.

1. As festival season gives way to the festive season, autumn is another key quarter for the physical retail sector (both brick-and-mortar and short-term retail). Indoor sports events, Christmas markets, and global sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday ensure that physical retail remains a vital industry year-round.

2. Festivals, large sporting events, and holiday sales can bring sudden spikes in foot traffic and wireless network overload. Pre-empting this bottleneck and keeping systems online throughout is a constant priority.

The upcoming season presents a unique opportunity to drive revenue and grow customer bases, provided the right systems are in place to manage spiking crowds, queuing, and payments.

Overcoming the specific challenges of the autumn retail period

The pre-Christmas period is one of the busiest times of year for brick-and-mortar stores. Last year, Black Friday weekend alone saw a 31% increase in in-store purchases in the US. With these crowds come unique retail challenges:

• Hybrid shopping: With hybrid shopping on the rise — where customers research their purchases online before completing them in-store, or vice versa — stores must be able to cater to this new shopping practice. POS systems with integrated inventory management software are a key tool for meeting customer expectations in Autumn 2025.

• Rising data demands: Whether it’s a mobile data spectrum at a festival or a wireless network in a shopping mall, in-store internet is usually limited to a specific bandwidth. Excessive crowds can push this connection to the limit, causing dropped signals and network outages at crucial points.

• POS system downtime: When this outage affects a point-of-sale system, the resulting POS downtime can have an immediate impact on revenue and a lasting effect on brand reputation.

• Queue management: A secondary issue with dropped POS connections is the impact on queue times. Even brief outages during already busy periods lead to queue abandonments in the short term and a long-term decline in brand trust. During peak shopping seasons, it doesn’t take long for customers to leave a queue: by some estimates, 70% of US shoppers will abandon a line they feel is taking too long.

For pop-ups and other short-term retail formats, wireless POS systems and retail data plans allow them to take payments nearly anywhere without having to rely on unfamiliar, unreliable, or unsecured local Wi-Fi.

For short-term retail, a reliable POS connection is equally essential.

• Queuing is often an unavoidable aspect of short-term retail formats like event stalls and pop-ups: they’re often deployed specifically for busy events like sports games, festivals, and markets, where crowding is the norm. In competitive multi-vendor events like Oktoberfest, rapidly processing payments is key to avoiding losing customers to nearby alternatives.

• In these environments, a mobile data connection for POS terminals must be reliable, fast, and offer minimal risk of downtime.

Always-on POS: the ticket to a successful autumn

When implemented correctly, innovations in the POS space can simultaneously reduce queuing, save revenue, and improve the customer experience – the Japanese clothing chain Uniqlo’s “magic” RFID-scanning self-checkouts are preferred to staffed checkouts by 70% of their customers, such is their ability to ease the checkout process.

Mobile POS (mPOS) systems are another wireless innovation that’s being enthusiastically taken up by independent vendors and multinational retail chains.

Regardless of the format or layout of their POS and checkout processes, all require a reliable, secure, and fast wireless connection. Relying on a single source of POS connectivity exposes retailers to a significant risk of downtime. Always-on POS is an emerging solution.

Always-on POS refers to any wireless point of sale system that maintains connectivity to more than one Wi-Fi or cellular network, re-connecting as needed in the event of an outage in one of them.

1GLOBAL SafeRetail is one example. POS systems enabled with SafeRetail have a constantly-ready backup source of connectivity. Should the first source fail, the system will automatically reconnect to another mobile data network and continue to operate as usual.

SafeRetail

SafeRetail by 1GLOBAL is a connectivity solution for physical retail stores that delivers uninterrupted connectivity for wireless Point of Sale and mPOS systems. SafeRetail connects these systems to the 1GLOBAL core network, providing coverage across 190+ countries on a single contract. In the event of a signal outage, these systems will automatically reconnect to the best available local mobile network, avoiding network downtime and allowing business to continue as usual.

SafeRetail can be employed...

1. ...as a primary connectivity source for all POS systems, providing a consistent level of high-speed data across the world, without downtime.

2. ...as a backup connectivity source in the event of a lost connection.

SafeRetail is specifically designed to support the flexibility of wireless POS terminals. The service enables vendors to expand into new regions and markets, confident that all transactions are handled over a reliable, fast, and cost-effective wireless connection.

Global coverage

SafeRetail offers worldwide coverage, connecting every POS system. For multinational retailers, the ability to handle fluctuating crowds across all countries of operation is a core requirement.

Globalization has caused opportunistic marketers to turn Black Friday into a worldwide event; autumn is also full of regionally and culturally specific shopping events. The 11th of November, or “Singles Day,” has become the largest shopping day in the world despite being celebrated almost exclusively in China, while Diwali sees a major uptick in physical shopping across India. Mexico’s El Buen Fin shopping weekend, also in November, regularly sees physical sales exceed $100 billion.

SafeRetail allows multinational retailers to manage these multiple periods of heightened activity, scaling wherever needed to deliver a better consumer experience.

Why an always-on POS is a requirement for 2025:

• Customer experience: An always-on POS system is the key to reducing wait times. At events like Oktoberfest or Autumn sales, queue length can be the deciding factor for customers.

• Employee satisfaction: The secondary effects of downtime are less quantifiable, but arguably more damaging: repeated dropped connections in stores erode brand trust and drive employee dissatisfaction.

The rise of mPOS

Wireless point of sale systems have redefined the customer experience in modern retail: they allow employees to conduct transactions with customers anywhere in the store, reducing bottlenecks at the checkout, and they allow businesses to explore new retail formats that don’t require a fixed terminal.

As smartphones become more sophisticated, and 4G/5G data speeds become globally available, retailers are increasingly using mobile phones as POS systems (known as mPOS).

Retail businesses require a scalable and secure wireless connectivity strategy before exploring the possibilities of mPOS and experimenting with the new retail formats the technology promises.

The holidays are coming

A key advantage of eSIM-based POS systems like mPOS or tablets is how easy they are to set up and distribute. A service like SafeRetail by 1GLOBAL can be instantly and remotely deployed to all POS systems around the world, and continually managed via a centralized online platform. The grace period between the last of the summer festival season and the autumn sales provides brands with the opportunity to audit their checkout processes and plan for the holiday season.

By adopting SafeRetail now, retailers can prepare for the pre-holiday rush without the spectre of POS downtime hanging over their heads. This shift from Wi-Fi-only dependence to resilient, multi-network wireless solutions is already happening across the industry - embracing the latest technologies helps build a sustainable POS model for handling the Autumn sales, holiday period, January sales, and beyond.

Contact 1GLOBAL today to explore how to prepare a resilient and reliable retail strategy for the busiest time of the year, and beyond.