Smartphone Payments,cellphone pay,ebilling,epayment,android payments,use smart phone to pay online
Pay For Your coffee Via Smartphone - Are You Ready to Pay by Cellphone?
Does the announcement by Starbucks Wednesday that customers could now pay for their coffee via smartphone mean the move to electronic payments is finally coming?
We’ve been hearing for years about the rise of a cashless society, one in which coins, bills and even credit cards are obsolete. One day, pulling out a credit card is going to make you look like this blogger’s mom, who continues to pay by check at the grocery store.
But it’s a bit like robot servants and virtual reality: We keep waiting, and the technology is used in other countries, but the day still hasn’t arrived in the U.S.
The Starbucks move, combined with a few other developments by companies like Google Inc., means we’re closer to real-world stores accepting these smartphone payments, even if consumers don’t make the change (no pun intended) right away.
Starbucks tested the program in several cities and found that the smartphone app was the fastest way to pay for many people. More than a third of Starbucks customers use smartphones, the company said, and many of them have their phones out anyway while in line.
The app works with the Starbucks Card system and is available on iPhone and BlackBerry devices. A version for Google’s Android platform will arrive later. When a user makes a Starbucks purchase, the cashier scans a barcode on the phone, and the sale is tied to the customer’s Starbucks Card account, which can be replenished via credit card (or PayPal in some cases).
In fact, Starbucks was so enthused about cellphone payments that it is using its own technology to enable scanning of the barcode that appears on the Starbucks Card app, technology blog Mashable points out. Another option, called “near field communication,” is touted by some as the future of mobile payments, but Starbucks didn’t want to wait for such technology to become widespread.
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