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I really don't understand what the companies involved with MCX are thinking. They build an app that is going in the opposite direction of where the market is he
by jimkri 11y ago
I really don't understand what the companies involved with MCX are thinking. They build an app that is going in the opposite direction of where the market is heading and limit the amount of payments they accept.
I was in line at 7-11 at my university, where an girl was trying to use the currentc app. She was 2 people ahead of me, when I went up to pay she was still trying to pay with the app. At first her screen was to dim, and the scanner would not read the QR code. Eventually she was able to pay, but I was already long gone by that time. If you look on the google play store it has a rating of 1.1 starts.
This is straight from its website,"Merchant Customer Exchange is the only merchant-owned mobile commerce network built to streamline the customer shopping experience across all major retail verticals."
With an app that rates 1.1 stars and no improvement, I don't think it cares about the shopping experience, and people will see this eventually.
- untog 11y agoA clue to what the companies are thinking from the article: "Its payments are also routed from the retailer to the ACH system instead of the credit card system, which saves retailers from having to pay interchange fees (typically around 2% of the transaction amount)"
- jimkri 11y agoYea I realized that when I was thinking about it. Which is a financial smart reason, but in the end it limits them. If I only have my phone which I have android pay on and I need to get something from a drug store, I would go to CVS but they don't accept NFC. So I will have to go to Walgreen's instead which is usually near a CVS. So I don't get why they don't offer NFC, because keeping 98% of the transaction amount is better than 0.
- untog 11y agoBecause what you're saying won't happen in a lot of situations. Drugs stores are interchangeable, but Target and Walmart are much less so, particularly out of urban centres.
- jimkri 11y agoYea that is true, I totally forgot about towns where Walmart is the only store.
- ISL 11y agoIf your margin is only a few percent, 2% is a big deal. What matters to a retailer isn't the revenue, it's the difference between costs and revenue.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoWalmart is also smart about this. They algorithmically determine how many cashiers to have at certain times of the day, under the assumption that even though some people may give up and leave instead of waiting in line, its still more profitable for that to occur than to staff more cashiers for everyone to complete their purchases in a timely manner. In the real world, its about profits, not volume.
- jimkri 11y agoGood point, with Walmart they will generate revenue no matter what, but to cut cost it makes sense to use it.
- ska 11y agoIsn't this the entire point of the exercise? It certainly doesn't seem to be about consumers.
- TheCoelacanth 11y agoThey also get to offload the burden of paying for fraudulent transactions onto the user.
- Shank 11y agoThe Google Play rating is partially because of irate Apple Pay & (formerly Google Wallet) customers. CurrentC prevents (prevented?) a retailer from using competing contactless payment solutions. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the reviews have never used the actual app, but have instead downloaded it and rated it one star in response to stories like this: https://daringfireball.net/2014/10/nfc_apple_pay https://daringfireball.net/2014/10/nfc_apple_pay
- InfiniteEntropy 11y agoThey're thinking they'd rather avoid paying credit card fees so they'd prefer to get straight at peoples money at the cost of making it a piece of shit to use.