The goWholesale Blog

Crazy Breakfast Making Cell Phones - Part II

April 16th, 2008

Okay, don’t freak…there was no Part I so don’t go looking for it. Well, there sort of was…this is simply an addendum to my previous post Oh So Textual! *Text Message Shopping Has Arrived*.

When you bought your cell phone did you ever imagine that one day it would allow you to pay for things? No seriously, your cell phone as a form of currency? Yeah, neither did I. But now you can. I know! It’s nuts!

Ok, so here’s how it works (courtesy StorefrontBacktalk.com):

Step 1: You download an applet on your phone. Said applet would be associated with a payment method, a password, and possibly another form of authentication.

Step 2: The retailer would have a piece of compatible software installed in their POS system.

Step 3: You shop in the store as you normally do, picking out items for purchase. When you’ve selected you bring your items to the cashier.

Step 4: The cashier scans the bar codes of your items and tells you the total.

Step 5: You enable the mobile payment app, type in your password, and punch in the exact amount of your total.

Step 6: If all goes well up to this point, the app will display a bar code that the cashier would then scan with the same bar code wand as they used to scan your products. The bar code would include the exact amount, a date/time stamp and expire within 60 seconds in case you want to abandon the purchase.

Here are some of the other things it would do:

Update the credit limit—or bank account balance—that the consumer could still use. According to the patent holder/inventor, Bob Lovett, “The merchant’s scanner also outputs a barcode containing the product’s price. The cell phone’s camera makes a copy of the barcode and then converts it to dollars and updates your remaining balance. This will alert card holder when an account is overdrawn.”

The phone’s payment data would include the consumer’s age which would theoretically accelerate purchases of age-restricted items (alcohol, cigarettes, fireworks, adult-themed magazines, etc.) as well as establish retailer due-diligence and enabling such purchases to go through self-checkout.

And here’s the kicker for merchants:

This type of payment system will allow for cheaper handling of micro-payments. Merchants would keep a record of the small transactions in a spreadsheet and when the banks are least busy, they would send the spreadsheet to them for processing. It would cost around five to ten cents as opposed to the twenty-five they pay for Visa transactions.

Yeah…that’s awesome.

For the rest of the the StorefrontBacktalk.com article, including the reaction of the National Retail Federation and others click here.

Posted in In the News |

The goWholesale Blog

Crazy Breakfast Making Cell Phones - Part II

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