In Paris MacDonald’s customers can now pay for their orders using their Smartphone or tablet devices all thanks to the company’s project to spread the concept to 33,500 locations worldwide. So customers in France can order what ever they like using their Macdonald’s mobile app, then they pay using PayPal and wait in a separate line to collect their meals. This is one of the many revolutionary changes that are happening to consumer service processes, moving further away from cash payments to credit cards, and even mobile payments. Not only is this more convinient for the customers who will not need to walk with a lot of money, it will also help make the buying process much more efficient.
MacDonalds is not the only one improving their payment methods, other companies like 7-Eleven, Target, Best Buy have also collaborated to create Merchant Customer Exchange. Merchant Customer Exchange is a group that is responsible for developing a mobile app that will be used by customers to pay for products and services using their mobile devices. Customers will also be given exclusive coupons and deal if they do a certain task. One of the mobile apps that are gaining popularity is Square, which was developed by one of the developers from Twitter and is used to process credit card transactions between customers and retailers. Anyway, Square seem to be gaining a lot of attention, in fact it recently collaborated with Starbucks to provide the interantional coffee giant process mobile payments.
Google also came up with a feature of their own – Google Wallet which plans to turn user’s phones into wallets, driver’s license and house key all at the same time. Bigger companies in the market like PayPal are fighting to stay dominant in this highly compatitive mobile-payment industry. In PayPal’s other effort to stay on top it also struck several others with other retailers.
I’ll use Google Wallet or a credit card. I am not going to try all of these apps.
One of the – if not THE- world’s largest fast “junk food” chain partnering with one of the most “questionable” companies…Why am I not getting a good feeling about this partnership? Don’t get me wrong. I am a proponent of progress and change and I support mobile payments. In fact, I am using a mobile POS from mPowa which I am very satisfied of. But I’m still trying to sort “this” out.
This is probably the way things are going in future for most retailers, but I’m personally not yet confident enough that my phone is secure enough to get involved.
Once I overcome this “fear” (perhaps unrealistically founded, but still there) I’ll join the party. In the meantime I’ll continue to pay cash or with my debit card, thank you!
Yeah,I kinda feel the same but I will say that I can imagine once most of the ‘bugs’ are worked out,that such could be very valuable and desirable as far as saving time and frustration.
We shall see……