Commerce Weekly: Mobile payments and the consumer experience

Mobile payments gets a UX analysis, e-gifting gets social, and Nook will get NFC.

Here are a few stories from the commerce space that caught my eye this week.

Don’t forget the mobile payment UX

PayPalSquareLogo.jpgCompetition in the mobile payment space is heating up, as Square’s payment pace closes in on PayPal’s, according to a report at Bloomberg. The report highlights a recent move by Square to lure in merchants: “The San Francisco company is making cash from sales before 5 p.m. on any day available in merchants’ accounts on the next business day, compared with as many as five days out for other processors.”

The real endgame, though, will be adoption by consumers, and Lauren Goode over at All Things Digital addressed the battle to control digital wallets from a UX perspective. Goode reports on her experience shopping around San Francisco and New York, paying either with Pay with Square or PayPal’s mobile app. She says both apps are easy to use and that the biggest issue for both was the lack of merchants accepting payments of this type. Another issue she mentions caught my eye, however — the execution inconsistencies:

“Square has been touting the idea that this app actually allows for ‘hands-free’ payments … One shop I bought coffee at didn’t see my name right away, even though I had turned on the tab in the iPhone version of the app. I tried to buy another item using the app on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android phone, and my name didn’t appear at all on the list of customers in the store.

But at another downtown coffee shop I was able to walk in, place my order and say, ‘Charge it to Lauren Goode’ — without taking my phone out of my pocket — and the transaction was completed in seconds.”

And regarding a beef jerky purchase using PayPal’s app:

“Since data service on my phone happened to be particularly bad in that area, I initially had trouble dropping the digital pin within the app that’s supposed to let the merchant know I was there. The merchant also had to reboot his phone once to process the payment on his end. But once I switched over to Wi-Fi, I had four options for paying him …”

Goode also reports on location-based features and the importance of merchant-provided content — her entire account is well worth the read.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

E-gifting and mobile commerce get social

Social gifting is gearing up to be one of the next big mobile commerce booms, according to a report at Reuters. The post focuses on the launch of Wrapp, a Swedish-based app startup, and highlights the blurring lines of online and brick-and-mortar commerce worlds. It describes the app:

“It allows Facebook friends to buy each other gift cards from participating retailers either individually or by teaming up, which they can store on their mobile devices and redeem either online or inside physical stores. Retailers like it because there is little marketing cost and because customers often end up buying more once they are inside the store.”

Wrapp’s CEO Hjalmar Winbladh told Reuters, “Brick-and-mortar retailers are all looking for new, more efficient ways to drive sales into stores without diluting their brands … we wanted to really see how retailers can leverage the megatrends of smartphones and social networks.”

TheFind also launched a social commerce app this week. It’s called Glimpse, and it’s a Facebook app that, according to the press release, “uses Facebook Like data from across the web to instantly personalize and curate a stream of fashion and design items that are trending, tailored to the tastes and preferences of an individual and their community of Facebook friends.”

Ryan Kim at GigaOm calls the shopping discovery app a Pinterest rival and reports: “TheFind’s CEO Siva Kumar told me TheFind has been working with Facebook for some time to bridge the two data sets, mapping a user’s likes to products, their taxonomy and a user’s profile. Now, when a Glimpse user likes a page, the service can determine what product the URL is referring to, can pull up the most recent availability and pricing data and also fit it into different styles and trends.”

Move over smartphones, NFC to unlock experiences for Nook users

In an interview at CNN Fortune, Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch talked about the future of the Nook and the recently announced partnership with Microsoft. In talking about opportunities in offline-online integration, Lynch offered an example of how B&N will improve customers’ experiences:

“We’re going to start embedding NFC [near-field communications] chips into our Nooks. We can work with the publishers so they would ship a copy of each hardcover with an NFC chip embedded with all the editorial reviews they can get on BN.com. And if you had your Nook, you can walk up to any of our pictures, any our aisles, any of our bestseller lists, and just touch the book, and get information on that physical book on your Nook and have some frictionless purchase experience. That’s coming, and we could lead in that area.”

Lynch told Fortune the NFC experience could appear as early as this year.

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