Intuit Pay enters U.K., PayPal Here takes on Square Register
On the heels of PayPal announcing it would bring PayPal Here to the U.K. later this year, Intuit launched its Intuit Pay mobile payments solution in the U.K. market. The platform includes a mobile app and a card reader, much like its competitors iZettle’s, Payleven’s and (soon) PayPal Here’s platforms.
Ingrid Lunden reported at TechCrunch that like its competitors, Intuit Pay will charge a per-transaction fee — in its case, a 2.75% flat rate — but unlike its competition, Intuit will offer its mobile payment card readers for free for a limited time. Lunden noted that Intuit Pay will be able to integrate with Intuit’s QuickBooks accounting software and its other business products, so offering the card reader for free doubles as an incentive for merchants to join Intuit’s business ecosystem.
The card reader at launch is available only for iOS devices, but Lunden reported that “other platforms like Android are on their way soon.”
In related news, PayPal launched PayPal Here for the iPad to compete with Square Register as a small business point-of-sale solution. Leena Rao reported at TechCrunch that the app — PayPal’s first native tablet app — features multiple log-in capability to accommodate multiple employees and multiple “cash registers,” and allows for a variety of payment methods, including swiping a credit card with PayPal Here, manual card number entry, and scanning a card using Card.io. Rao also noted that the app integrates with eBay’s RedLaser technology so merchants can scan barcodes to make a sale or even to add to their inventories, something Square Register isn’t yet capable of doing.
PayPal’s new iPad app only works in the U.S. using the PayPal Here dongle, but Rao reported that PayPal intends to integrate the technology with its international offerings in the future.
Insights into the future of retail from SXSW panels
Retail and the future of commerce has been a topic of sessions and discussions this week at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. In a post at Publishers Weekly, Rachel Deahl reported on the “Retail is Going Mobile” panel, which covered the ways in which mobile has already changed the retail experience and how it might influence it going forward.
Deahl highlighted comments from panel member Christopher Mason, CEO and co-founder of Branding Brand, who noted many retailers are falling behind in their mobile strategies, if they even have one. Deahl reported:
“Mason said that, of the top 500 retailers, 60% have a mobile consumer interface. This means, he noted, that for the first time, the relationship between the customer and the retailer is being shaped in a world where ‘the customer is ahead of the retailer.'”
Looking at where mobile is headed, Deahl noted that Mason pointed to Sephora’s new “skin scanner” technology that personalizes and IDs a customer’s unique skin tone and integrates with Sephora’s mobile app to send customers alerts when new products for their coloring arrive. “This kind of user experience, Mason feels, is where mobile retailing is headed,” Deahl wrote. “He sees mobile retailing apps focusing on using our personal information to improve and personalize the in-store experience, such as, say, alerting a customer how many pairs of shoes are in stock in their size when they enter the shoe store.”
In a post at Salon.com, Andrew Leonard covered an SXSW panel that featured Mondelēz International’s VP of global media and consumer engagement B. Bonin Bough. Bough related an in-store experiment that points to the future of retail. Leonard wrote:
“Bonin described an experiment with shoppers at Stop & Shop who used their mobile phones to scan the bar codes of the items they wanted to buy, and then paid with their phones at checkout. He said that by seeing what shoppers were scanning, in real time, Mondelēz could zap them coupons for different items physically located on that aisle and were able to significantly boost sales of those items. ‘Targeting people in aisle, in the moment, at the moment of truth, is the holy grail of retail marketing,’ said Bonin. This is how the millennial shoppers of the future, who are ‘more mobile, more connected, and more into sharing,’ will do their business.”
Time editor at large Harry McCracken also served as a moderator on an SXSW panel called “Mobile Disruption & the Rise of the Local Web” that addressed the rise of services involving commerce between local individuals, which are designed more for phones and mobile devices than for PCs. In a post at Time Tech, McCracken noted that the panel discussion kept circling back around to person-to-person lodging rental service Airbnb — one attendee in the session tweeted: “Wow… About a quarter of the room here at #SXSW2013 is staying at @airbnb place. Hotel chains – prepare for major disruption. #localweb.” McCracken aggregated tweets sent during the session using Storify to highlight the session’s key points — you can read his post at Time Tech.
FTC report tackles mobile payments concerns
The rapid growth in the mobile payments arena — one recent study estimated global mobile payments transactions could reach $1 trillion by 2015 — has caught the attention of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The government agency released a report this week, “Paper, Plastic… or Mobile? An FTC Workshop on Mobile Payments.” According to the press release, the report offers guidelines for developing dispute resolution policies, encourages industry-wide adoption of strong security measures, and “highlights the need for companies in the mobile payment sphere to practice ‘privacy by design,’ incorporating strong privacy practices, consumer choice, and transparency into their products from the outset.”
Diane Bartz reported at Reuters that the FTC’s report “also urged all companies in the mobile data chain — from app sellers to telecommunications companies — to encrypt the entire payment chain and take other steps to ensure that consumers’ data cannot be hacked and used to steal from them.” She noted the FTC also is encouraging mobile payments companies to be more transparent with consumers about how their data is collected and used, and quoted from the report: “‘Companies should provide reasonable security for consumer data and should limit data collection to that which is consistent with the context of a consumer’s interaction with that company,” the report said.'”
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