Windows Phone Still Failing Small Biz Owners

When the time comes for a small business to look at a mobile platform, too many of them don’t even glance at Windows Phone. Unfortunately, this is for a good reason. For all the positives that Windows Phone devices deliver to a business owner, there are still a few glaring negatives in the mix that just can’t be overlooked. Going back to my April story of Where Windows Phone Fails Small Business Owners, the three items that were highlighted are still major issues for smaller companies.

The lack of a native or 3rd party fax from mobile solution is terrible. Both Android and iPhone are getting more and more refined options for mobile faxing, while Windows Phone still has only 2 third party options that are both non-functional. It’s sad, but true. The lack of connectivity for Windows Phones is only the start of the issue for these users though, as the issues continue with the lack of wireless printing.

Wireless printing is almost a no-brainer today. Both Android and iOS have 100’s of options available for wirelessly printing documents directly from them. Windows Phone however, has zero. About the only way to get that precious Word document to print without a computer is to grab a printer with HP Connect and email the files to it. Not the best way to get a contract printed, but at least it is something. It’s almost a sin that Microsoft hasn’t just dropped some pressure on long time PC partners like HP and Epson to create a wireless driver for Windows Phone, but apparently they don’t see the urgency in doing so.

Credit card acceptance… Wow! So here we are 6 months after my first post about this and guess what? There’s two viable options, sort of. Aircharge is the first one, but it doesn’t seem to play nice with WP8 and they want $345 for a reader. Ouch! The second option is MerchantPlus. The MerchantPlus system isn’t terrible, but the monthly fees are more than most small biz owners would ever want to endure.

The start up fee is $14.99 to download the App. Then you have your first monthly maintenance fee of $29.95 and a first time transaction fee of $15.00. Then you pay just 2.15% on the transactions for the month. This means to match someone like Square at 2.75%, you would need to ring through about $10,000 to make that cost back. So, while the one time fee disappears, the monthly cost of MerchantPlus is just too high to be considered an option for many small mobile businesses. With the $359.40 a year monthly fee, you would need to turn quite a large amount of charges to bring the cost inline with the ‘free’ providers like PayPal and Square.

Overall, Windows Phone and Microsoft have made no ground on the others in fixing these glaring small biz errors. I guess they are depending on someone else to grow the business end of their platform for them. Overall though, the lack of a few key features doesn’t make Windows Phone less attractive for business, but it may scare a few people off with it’s lack of options.