It seems like you can’t pick up the Wall Street Journal without reading about mobile payments here in the United States. This weekend the paper wrote about Google’s mobile payment deal with MasterCard and Citigroup. Then again this morning they wrote about American Express and their new digital payments platform aimed squarely at PayPal. Upstarts like Zong are helping consumers buy digital goods using their phone. PayPal is even trying to innovate around mobile payments despite their mobile guru, Osama Bedier, leaving the company to join Google to build yet another mobile payments system. Why so much interest in the market? Generator Research reports that mobile payments will increase from $68 billion to $633 billion by 2014.
Here in the United States (unlike Asian countries like Japan) consumers haven’t used their mobile devices to pay for goods, but everyone believes this is about to change. I can recall analyst reports from the mid-90s asking consumers if they would be willing to give their credit card numbers to retailers on the internet. Much like the movement from brick and mortar purchasing to online purchasing, we believe more and more Americans will begin to use their mobile device to pay for goods and services. This belief is driving our development efforts at ShopSavvy.
Since launching our partnership with PayPal and Cardinal Commerce in 2009 we have learned a lot about mobile payments. Unfortunately we have mostly learned what NOT to do. Here are some of the lessons we have learned:
• do not require consumers to use a single payment form • do not require merchants to use a particular processor • do not require merchants to use a particular integrator • do not depend on the merchant to do anything
Consumers have their favorite payment methods. The key is to allow them to use ANY payment form inside of your system, while removing as much payment inertia as possible. Amazon has done an excellent job doing this. Their ‘wallet’ allows a consumer to pay with any payment form, while making buying as simple as ‘one click’. Of course in mobile there are rarely any ‘clicks’, instead you have ‘touches’ and ‘swipes’.The holy grail of mobile payments is to create a system that will work with ALL merchants.
This is where ShopSavvy comes into play. Consumers are already using scan app moments before actually buying the product they are scanning. ShopSavvy reveals comparison pricing information about other retailers helping the consumer make an informed purchase decision. If the consumer could use their payment data already stored inside of ShopSavvy to complete the purchase – i.e. a one tap payment – we believe our solution would be as powerful as Amazon’s solution with one important distinction: neutrality.
Our data shows that Amazon’s prices are the lowest only 6% of the time. That means that in 94% of scanner apps for iphone our users are seeing better deals from other retailers. With a single scan consumers can be sure to find the best deal and with a single tap they can complete a purchase. QuickPay 2 makes mobile payments for products a reality.
Investors have been asking me how ShopSavvy will compete with all those other wallets from Google, PayPal, Zong and AMEX. The answer is relatively simple: we will support any payment form that is popular. ShopSavvy isn’t building a wallet, per se, instead we are building a shopping platform with payment integration. |