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Marketers Turning to Mobile Payments to Help Smooth Shopping Experiences

June 15, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that the mobile payments market in general is still a comparatively young market.

Indeed, Apple Pay—one of the biggest names in the field so far—isn’t even a year old yet, and only recently made a launch outside of the United States, going for a launch in the United Kingdom.

But with the rise of this market comes a lot of concern about things like privacy and security, and a lot of new opportunities for businesses to take advantage of this concept to fuel business, something that hasn’t been acted upon much lately.

Particularly in the UK, this is a market that’s really just getting started. Indeed, some started to wonder if the Apple launch was what kicked off a huge slug of news in the mobile payments sector for the region.

A day after Apple’s announcement, news about Camelot’s plans to let National Lottery players pay for tickets via mobile phone followed. We even saw a new launch shortly after Apple with the rise of Zapp’s planned summer launch, and even O2 brought in a new managing director specifically to handle its mobile payment / marketing platform known as Weve.

Though all of those items only recently hit, there are actually signs that the market actually got off to a start a few years back.

Starbucks, for example, started offering mobile payments systems back in 2012 with its own branded app, and was ready to expand further with Apple Pay.

Costa Coffee was turning to Apple Pay directly to allow customers to pay for coffee and food alike. But that wasn’t a new development either, as Costa had previously released a mobile loyalty app a year ago and Costa was reportedly looking into means to couple mobile payments systems with the mobile loyalty app.

All of these points together add up to one thing: while for quite some time the mobile payments market as a whole was limited to a lot of talk and some products that were “coming soon,” soon is now in many cases here.

We’re seeing how these payments systems are changing markets, and how customers are responding. Essentially, the old saws remain active; mobile payments are part of a larger customer experience, and the company that provides the best in customer experience, all else being equal, is likely to succeed in the end.

While not offering a mobile payments option may not run off customers or keep new ones from coming in, how many businesses will be interested in taking that chance?

Like Starbucks noted in a recent discussion with Marketing Magazine, its customers love innovation, and how many customers will Starbucks keep as a result of its improved commitment to mobile? How many customers will migrate to Starbucks away from coffee shops that don’t, or won’t, offer mobile payments? How universal is the desire for innovation?

These are questions that likely keep retailers up at night, and the better answers are found, the more likely the business as a whole is to survive. Only time will tell just what kind of penetration mobile payments will see over the course of the next few months—let alone years—but this isn’t a market that’s going away any time soon, and mobile payments will likely help reduce friction, make for more efficient transactions, and get customers interested in coming back to do business with firms the world over.