Crazy Breakfast Making Cell Phones - Part II
by Rebecca Button on 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 .