How Mashgin scales checkout innovation with Verifone Commander

Great technology can move fast. Getting it into a complex convenience retail environment often doesn't.

For Mashgin, an AI-powered computer vision checkout provider, expanding into convenience retail meant navigating payments, loyalty, pricing, promotions, taxes, reporting, back-office systems, and the forecourt.

"The integration timeline, cost and complexity has been the number one challenge," says Steve O'Toole, Head of Convenience and Fuel Retail Business Development at Mashgin.

The partnership with Verifone offered a different approach: instead of rebuilding the infrastructure around its solution, Mashgin could integrate with Verifone Commander and focus on what it does best.

Today, the integration has expanded to 20+ customers and 200+ sites.

Making it easier to bring innovation to market

For a checkout experience to work in convenience retail, it needs to connect with much more than payments.

Through Commander, Mashgin can leverage existing capabilities for price book, promotions, sales tax, payments, loyalty, prepay fuel, car wash and sales reporting.

"The engine is Commander," O'Toole says. "We can focus on what we do."

That's the value of an open ecosystem: not simply connecting technologies, but giving differentiated solutions a more direct path into an established commerce environment.

For Mashgin, it also means keeping valuable development resources focused on its own innovation.

"We don't have to divert our scarce and expensive development resources to doing infrastructure-type projects," O'Toole says. "We can focus on improving our products."

From integration to scale

Simplifying the integration also changes the path to deployment.

Mashgin can stand up its solution in a customer's lab, validate the experience and move into a live store without beginning every engagement with a lengthy integration project. Once the value is proven, the model creates a more repeatable path to expansion.

"We can go get in quickly. We can measure the results, and then we can quickly scale," O'Toole says.

That approach has helped Mashgin grow its Verifone-integrated footprint to more than 200 sites across 20+ customers.

It's also helped unlock capabilities that would otherwise be difficult to deliver. One example is prepay fuel. By connecting through Commander, Mashgin can incorporate prepay fuel into its checkout experience — a category Mashgin says is consistently its number-one-selling item by dollar amount.  

Innovation that delivers merchant value

For merchants, the technology behind the experience largely disappears.

Shoppers put down their items, Mashgin identifies them, loyalty and promotions can be applied, and the customer pays. Mashgin reports average credit transaction times of approximately 15 seconds — two to three times faster than a typical checkout experience.

The underlying integration makes that experience possible without requiring Mashgin to become an expert in every system operating behind it.

That's ultimately what an open ecosystem should enable: partners bringing their best capabilities to the table, supported by the infrastructure needed to deploy them at scale.

Building what's next, together

No single technology company will build every capability merchants need. The opportunity is to create an ecosystem where differentiated solutions can work together — and where partners can spend more time advancing their technology and less time rebuilding what's already there.

For technology providers considering building with Verifone, O'Toole's advice is straightforward:

"Start the conversation."

Mashgin's experience shows what that conversation can lead to: a simpler path to integration, more room to innovate and a stronger foundation to scale.

What could you build with Commander?

We're growing our ecosystem with partners bringing differentiated capabilities to commerce. Explore partnering with Verifone today.

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