Mobile Commerce today published an article “PayPal backs QR codes for real-world dominance as online competition grows” which took a look at PayPal’s announced support for QR codes in their mobile payment application. The article looks at the strength of QR codes as a payment mechanism relative to other technologies including Bluetooth and NFC.
Pervasive’s Brian Stein was quoted in the article, reflecting on the reason why PayPal would add QR codes to their supported technology when they already provided other alternative technologies.
Flexible approach
Together, PayPal’s QR code and Bluetooth strategies point to the need for a flexible approach to mobile payments thanks to a lack of consistency in hardware options for both consumers and retailers.“By supporting multiple technologies, PayPal allows retailers to either leverage existing technology, or choose the solution that will introduce the least amount of change impact for their organization, and thereby reduce the overall cost of implementation,” said Brian Stein, managing director at Pervasive Path, Cleveland, OH.
When evaluating payment technologies as a retailer, it is important to understand the total visible cost to the organization, and that means looking beyond just the development and integration costs, but also understanding the cost of hardware upgrades across each POS terminal, the change management effort as introduce new processes to your workforce and the efficiency impact as you redesign workflows to support the new technology.
