Commercial off-the-shelf products and services (COTS) are ready-made, packaged solutions adapted to meet a purchasing organization's needs, rather than solutions built to custom order.
Looking at this from a payment systems perspective, examples of applications referred to as COTS include the ready-made payment applications used to accept payments from smartphones and Android POS devices (pre-built kernels, Level 2-certified dongles, and so on).
An increasing number of businesses are using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices to accept and process payments. The purpose of establishing this new security standard is to enable these merchants to securely accept PIN-based payments using the PIN entered on the COTS device.
New developments in mobile technology offer more convenient and faster solutions without reducing the security level of standard payment transactions. Most importantly, the end-to-end secure transport of the entered PIN is now guaranteed until the payment transaction is completed.
Globally, a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) product is one used "as is." COTS products are designed to be easily installed and to work together with existing system components. Almost all software purchased by an average computer user falls into the COTS category: operating systems, office productivity suites, and email programs are just a few of countless examples. The biggest advantage of mass-produced COTS software is its low cost.
Purchasing commercial off-the-shelf products or services is an alternative to custom-tailored software or to products and services developed on a one-off basis.
Examples of this include Android POS devices that support contactless payments and mobile payment applications that enable mobile payments to be accepted from smartphones.