Amazon continues to dominate the headlines with the opening of their retail stores that have no cash registers….yes, the frictionless payments tech are cool, but the real news is how they have transformed the customer experience. As busy shoppers with tight schedules, we allow ourselves a certain amount of time to visit a store and make a purchase. While most of that time is spent looking at products and making buying decisions, we always have to reserve a portion of our allotted time to queue in the checkout line. Eliminating the checkout process means that Amazon has essentially enabled us as customers to spend 100% of our time in the store shopping for products.
“Retailers are looking for ways to improve and differentiate the customer shopping experience, decrease shrinkage and out-of-stock losses and drive incremental purchases,” said Azita Martin, General Manager for AI in Retail and CPG at NVIDIA.
quote pulled from Retail Dive
This crystallizes everything that is driving the hyper-growth of fintech today: eliminate the payment process as a separate workflow, and allow payments to occur within the workflows that created them. This is creating the Paradox of Payments: at the same time that frictionless payments technology is coming to the forefront, it’s also fading into the background. Consumers are becoming more aware of payment options, and at the same time relegating their payment choices to wallets and stored credentials.
This is the latest extension of what Amazon has done with online shopping, what Uber has done for ride-sharing, and what Door Dash and others have done for food delivery. Stored payment credentials allow the payment to happen in the background while the consumer focuses on the task at hand: ordering food, calling a ride, making a retail purchase.
Overview provided by Don Apgar, Director, Merchant Services Advisory Practice at Mercator Advisory Group
