Ciaos Creations

During the past few months, both Amazon and Paypal has announced mobile payment systems on their respective platforms. Listening to reports on mobile payment usage in India, Africa and Japan has me wondering if or when the United States will ever adopt the behavior.

Yesterday I read Caleb Elston’s post on mobile payments titled “Are Mobile Payments the Next Big Thing?“; it was very good read. The payment process he described was a process that I believe is simpler than I thought was possible. Before, my assumption was mobile payment would be possible through a mobile web app or a native mobile app.

There were other thoughts going through my head besides implementation, such as what are the use-cases mobile payments would be preferred over the traditional payment methods, e.g. cash and credit.  Mobile Payment Adoption will be a challenge due to the habits and existing infrastructure for cash and credit.  So lets just jump around to a few examples.

Digital Goods, Online Shopping
When buying digital goods or shopping online, mobile payments work well in this type of scenario mainly because the check-out process is asynchronous between the buyer and seller, which the seller is an automated machine.  The maximum number of simultaneous check-outs is almost infinite for these shopping experiences, mainly limited by broadband and server resources.  This example could be consider as a natural progression of commerce from a desktop device to a mobile device.

Simple Singular Transaction
This tangent is sprouted from how Japan and some privileged American Cities purchase their train tickets.  Purchasing train tickets scenario is a simple process of fee that rarely change. Mobile Payment could be automated in that it is just a quick swipe of the mobile device or gateway  that initiates the transaction.  This example is rather simple and somewhat uninteresting. It is a substitution of the payment medium.

Physical Stores or Merchants
All of us are familiar with the process of making purchases in the physical space.  Walking from aisle to aisle, acquiring physical goods, to check-out by standing in a queue to a limit number of cashiers.  This example is synchronous, both the buyer and seller have to interact in real-time, both of which are human.  This is the scenario in which I am interested to see how mobile payment has an affect.  I find it to be my largest pain point and an experience that could be improved on. Changing the habit of purchasing physical goods is and will be a very difficult task.

So those are the first three use-cases that are floating in my head. I intend on promoting mobile payments, but I am just having trouble finding a good scenario that mobile payments can improve upon.

That is it for now.