Contactless Payment System

[Scottish Business Owner]

An interesting article below regarding using your mobile phone to pay for small purchases under a tenner. Nokia have just conducted a fairly long trial of the technology and claim it was a big success.

Big demand for pay by phone tech, claims Nokia | The Register

If this technology was available would you use it? If not what would concern you about it?

 

[cre8tivesolutions]

Hi

I actually offer this service to my customers and havent had any complaints yet.

Its along the same lines of bulk text messaging etc and its avsolutely fantastic for taking payments.

We've used it for taking all kinds of payments as the certificates used are similar to those used online.

M-Commerce is certainly a growing market.

just thought id also add in that this isnt self promotion, just trying to let members know the benefits from a business point of view.

 

[Scottish Business Owner]

Hi Jamie,

I think paying for stuff like train tickets and coffee it's a great idea. I've lost count of the number of times i've went to grab a sandwich and then realised I have no money on me and then have to look for a cashpoint.

As a technology it seems quite straight forward so why isn't it being adopted on any large scale? You'd have thought mobile phone companies for one would be trying to create differentiation between themselves and other network providers.

 

[IainKay]

I recon the technology hasn't been adopted on a large scale because of the payment processing costs.
If I recall correctly you make about £1.00 of a £1.50 charge, that's quite a lot to be loosing especially over multiple texts. You would end up costing clients £15 for a £10 ticket for example.

 

[cre8tivesolutions]

hiya /iain

i defintely think its great for those kind of things, especially as you say "on the move". at the moment it seems to be aimed at consumers to give them free texts online and text to win competitions.

i think what business have yet to clock on to on a big scale is just how convenient this is to actually pay for things.

with regards to the costs involved, what happens with the limited number of companies that accept wap payments (including myself) is that the company foots the bill (no greater than 7p) and the consumer gets the product at face value (or if the company is really tight, adds 7p on to the bill).

I let my sales team take wap payments from pda's and its increased the number of people willing to give a deposit for a website etc.