Stance, Moltin Get Together on App-Free Mobile Payments-Powered Checkout

We’ve been hearing about mobile checkout for some time now, and the whole thing always seems to be a bit underwhelming. Sometimes, it’s little more than a refinement of the current mobile point of sale (PoS) operation. It’s seldom as simple as it was originally projected, or at least, it wasn’t until now. Stance and Moltin recently dropped word our way about a new partnership that’s simplifying the mobile checkout system to the point we knew it could be simplified to.

With Stance and Moltin’s new operation, backed by Moltin’s application programming interface (API)-first platform, customers will be able to pull up a short URL on their smartphones, and then use said smartphones to scan items’ barcodes, paying for them with a credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay.

This is actually a big step forward; most other self-checkout systems require customers download an app first. The Stance / Moltin solution, meanwhile, requires users to instead use a web-based interface, which is much simpler than downloading an app. Though the website ultimately behaves the same way an app does, it’s set up for the customer to access, not to have to go through a download first.

Stance’s executive vice president of direct to consumer Paul Zaengle noted “People don’t want to wait in line, and they don’t want to download an app to avoid a line either. This solution combines the richness of a physical retail store visit with the convenience of ecommerce to give our guests the best experience possible.”

It really is a step up; going from putting the weight of infrastructure on the customer’s back to putting it on the business’ is a big step forward, and exactly the kind of thing we were looking for all along. Scan items with your smartphone’s camera, pay from the same interface, and then leave. About the only way this could get better is if it offered more payment options, like PayPal, Samsung Pay, or even cryptocurrency.

Still though, this is a great step up, and one that should take a lot of weight off the bottleneck at the front of the store known as the checkout line. It’s the kind of thing that probably should have been done by now, but better late than never.