How Will Beacons Enable Contactless Payments?
Proximity Marketing Technology is not just about drawing visitors and footfalls to retail stores, guiding them inside the stores and pushing store promotions to their smartphone screens and leave it there. Shopping is a circle of discovering-finding-visiting-shopping-consuming-checkout-cashback-revisiting. Which means, beacons and Bluetooth technology have a wider role play than that which seems obvious or limited. Its functionality extends upto the last leg of a shopper's journey, ie checkout or payment. Yes, interestingly, beacon devices can also help shoppers (and consequently retailers) take care of the payment headache by enabling a simple touchscreen payment that can be completed in a few seconds. Which means, long cashier queues, confusion and chaos at the checkout counters or rush during sales seasons - are all going to be history soon.
Why is this crucial in a shopper's journey is because it is currently a major issue that concerns them; leading to chaos, loopholes, confusion, waste of precious time, rush, etc. As shoppers are turning their face away from cash payments, annoying and chaotic cashier queues and traditional modes of payments at retail stores, retail owners too are embracing technology in order to make payment hasslefree and be able to manage things better. Since beacons will be already present inside the stores, and Bluetooth features on every single smartphone, the integration of beacons onto the POS system or checkout system will be a cake walk.
What will happen is, whenever a shopper completes their purchase, they have to walk near the counter and the nearest beacon will send a coupon code and a payment link via the App to the smartphone.. The payment can be completed in a few swipes and taps without even contacting the POS machine.