Loves Me, Loves Me Not: Mobile

Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but the weeklong “Loves Me” or “Loves Me Not” series on PYMNTS.com is just beginning. The second stop for the Market Platform Dynamics team is social commerce: loves me or loves me not?

Tim Attinger: Loves Me

I love my mobile, and my mobile loves me~!  To be fair, once upon a time I really didn’t.  Back in the days when I depended on my feature phone just to make calls, it wasn’t really my favorite technology. It made calls okay, and not all that reliably. It had scrolling text menus and some interactive capabilities — like the text where you push numbers multiple times to choose letters. I could also download ringtones if I was willing to scroll endlessly through options. It didn’t really have any payments or payments-related information capabilities, unless you count the automated bill payment on my card at the end of every month.

But then so many things happened at once, and I fell in love with my mobile in a hot mad rush. My mobile went from feature phone to smart, with a graphic user interface and application capability that looked a lot like my laptop. It connected to a 3G network that allowed me to do email, and text, and download digital content, surf the internet, and find things with a combination of maps and locator services. And then marketing and advertising came to my mobile, and it changed the game.

Oh, I don’t use it for payments when I go shopping — I don’t know anyone who does. But what does that matter? I’ve got a card that works extremely well when I go to stores. But I can log on to the net on my mobile to do pre-purchase research while I’m walking down the street. I can subscribe to mobile services like Groupon and 4-Square to get great local offers for discounts and special promotions. I can find stores and contact them. I can get information about products when I’m  in a store. And…I can even download an app from Amazon that lets me scan a product o the shelf in a Target and then see if Amazon will sell me one for less. If they can, I can “click once” and it’s on the way to my house. Talk about avoiding checkout lines. There’s even a new company, called Cimbal, that lets me take a picture of a barcode in the checkout line and the merchant gets paid “in the cloud” while I cruise out the door.

I may not be using a chip in my phone to beam payment information to a receiver sitting on the countertop. But then, I’ve got all these other great services that make my shopping experience better — from end to end. And my mobile gets to do what it does best — not making calls, but tying me to a plethora of cloud services that help me find, research, price, discount, and track that next great purchase. Which I can still make with my card, thank you very much.

Margaret Weichert: Loves Me Not

Ok.  I know I am supposed to be feeling all warm and fuzzy about mobile payments, but there are so many flashy technology concepts floating around the mobile payments space these days.  But I haven’t found “the one” solution That will make consumers (not to mention cynics like me) fall in love.

There are lots of “convenient” solutions that ostensibly will make POS payments faster.  But I have found that, with the exception of transit, most of my pain points aren’t about payments at all.  Cash and loyalty cards work fine at starbucks….what I end up waiting for is my latte.  My rewards credit card works just fine at Nordstroms, but doesn’t speed up the time I spend waiting for someone to bring my shoes from the storeroom.

Similarly, there are lots of “wallet” solutions that theoretically will make it easier for me to carry around all my rewards cards.  The problem is no one makes it easy to load all those loyalty cards into that wallet.  I don’t have time to do that.  And I have no problem fitting all the loyalty cards I have into my wallet – if you have seen the handbags I carry (including the one I intend to buy myself as a belated valentines gift), you’d recognize that space in my wallet isn’t really an issue.

Finally, there are many people who tell me that mobile will bring me better deals and offers.  But I just haven’t seen too much of that yet.  I want 50% off at stores where I really shop, not some paltry coupon after visiting an uninviting store several times.

Nevertheless, under my my skeptical exterior i want to believe in mobile love at first sight.  So even though i know that the mobile Valentine’s Day gift I wanted hasn’t arrived yet…someday the perfect solution will arrive – an integrated mobile solution that makes shopping, ordering and transacting simpler, more convenient and less expensive.  That’s what I want for valentines day next year!


 

 

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