The goal of the service is to be able to provide a smooth and seamless omni-channel experience.
At the 2013 Money2020 event in Las Vegas, the vice president of retail and prepaid products at PayPal, Don Kingsborough, provided the team from QR Code Press with considerable insight into the goals and future of the service in the smartphone and tablet sphere.
Kingsborough referred to the use of these devices as “connected commerce”, which offers notable convenience.
Speaking on that subject, he explained that mobile payments as a part of connected commerce helps to bring everything together into one place, which makes adoption much easier on the consumer. It is important to note that consumers don’t care about the channel they choose to use for shopping. Their goal is to make sure that they have what they want, when they want it, in the way that they want it, and that it is easy for them to obtain.
PayPal understands that this is an important perspective for mobile payments and commerce.
If merchants wish to keep up with the desires and expectations of consumers, then they need to be the ones to deliver the products to those shopper no matter where they are, and at exactly the time that the product or service is wanted. This is a vital understanding for mobile payments adoption, because it points out that this is an opportunity for both merchants and consumers, provided that it is established to benefit both sides. Consumers will not choose to use it just because it’s there. It needs to answer the question “what’s in it for me?”.
In this, Kingsborough stated that the omni-channel experience needs to be developed through a smarter and faster infrastructure that uses a transaction system that can seamlessly cross over from brick and mortar point of sale, to online, to mobile payments. This means that the consumer never has to think about the process, but uses the service automatically in order to pay for the goods or services that they want, wherever they are, when they want them.
That said, PayPal has opened up the infrastructure to app developers whom they believe will have a much more significant role in the actual point of sale (POS). After all, the importance of mobile payments and commerce will only continue to rise as smartphones gain penetration among the populations of the world. Thus, they have decided to use technology that people are already accustom to like barcodes and now incorporating geolocation targeting within their new mobile commerce strategy.
PayPal has taken on the perspective that “mobile is the platform for consumer buying.” This is the arena in which shoppers can find exactly what they want, provided that mobile payments and merchants step up and offer it to them. In that light, the new PayPal app has been unveiled. It works with the Bluetooth technology based PayPal Beacon, notifying shoppers of deal opportunities as soon as they walk into stores.
This concept provides an enhanced omni-channel experience as in-store shopping is combined with location based marketing to bring about mobile payments and commerce transactions. This reveal was partnered with the rollout announcement of the new product from the company called the “payment code”. This uses QR codes in order to boost the security of transactions in a way that they feel is simple for consumers to adopt, as these barcode scans are already being widely made by consumers, and no additional infrastructure is required. If anybody needs proof that this barcode based concept can work, they need only look to Starbucks.
Check back tomorrow for the next announcements straight from Money2020.
