Mobile Payments

Bitcoin or Bitcon? The challenges facing the crypto-currency sector

It’s been a tumultuous month for the bitcoin community. A series of scandals has seen the price of the leading crypto-currency fall by over 50% from its peak of almost $1200 in December.

There’s been no shortage of criticism of bitcoin from economists and leading business people who see its recent woes as the start of its decline.

Yet despite all of this, the price is rising again and advocates of digital currencies remain optimistic.

Their outlook has been boosted by other news such as HRMC’s updated guidance that VAT is not chargeable on bitcoin transactions, which addresses a major spur to bitcoin-related innovation in the UK.

So is bitcoin real or still a passing fad? What needs to happen for it to move from its status as a water-cooler topic, to a genuine financial tool used by many people?

In February we surveyed 2,065 adults on their awareness and usage of bitcoin.

Our research identified three of the challenges facing these emerging currencies: security, usability and the language of crypto-currencies. Recent events have highlighted that these issues remain a challenge that the bitcoin sector needs to overcome.

Bakery chain Greggs launches mobile payment app. Is it any good?

Bakery chain Greggs has launched a new loyalty app that enables customers to pay in any of its 1,700 UK stores using their mobiles rather than cash or cards.

It aims to reward customer loyalty, with users getting offers, free coffee and prize draws as well as being able to see their purchase history.

Greggs is incentivising people to download the app by offering a free breakfast if people add £20 to their account, while the first 10,000 customers to sign up for ‘Auto Top-Up’ with PayPal will earn a £5 bonus credit.

This isn’t the first time mobile payments have come to the high street, as Starbucks has had a transactional mobile loyalty app for several years. Similarly Aurora Fashions Group, which owns Oasis and Warehouse among other brands, allows customers to pay using the PayPal inStore mobile app.

Game and B&Q also have excellent loyalty apps, though Game’s isn’t transactional.

30+ interesting stats about mobile commerce in APAC

We all assume that mobile commerce is big business in Asia-Pacific and that the region is light years ahead of Europe and the US in terms of mobile adoption.

However if you dig deeper into the stats you notice that all is not quite as it seems, with huge disparities appearing across the different APAC nations.

To find out a bit more about the state of mobile commerce and marketing in the region, I’ve rounded up several studies and surveys that reveal some interesting stats.

Bitcoin, mobile payments and the future of money

Money is changing, with a range of innovative new technologies looking to disrupt the established financial structures.

Chief among these are the crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin.  

But what are they, where did they come from, and are they really a threat to the traditional monetary system?

Reinventing, or perhaps just finessing, retail for 2014

What do customers want in a multichannel experience and how will technology help deliver it in 2014?

Customers don’t always know what it is they want, but by looking at current habits, themes will undoubtedly emerge.

Walker Sands has recently surveyed 1,000 US consumers on the future of retail. The results are interesting and give some pointers to retailers hoping to stay on consumer trend for buying habits.

Here are the best bits:

Eight cultural differences that impact conversion

You have a website, or perhaps you have multiple websites, and you want to ensure that conversion in markets outside of UK and US is as high as possible.

In this case, especially for markets in the Middle East and Asia, it pays to know how a country’s culture will impact interaction with your content.

Joe Doveton, Director of Conversion Services at Globalmaxer delivered a fascinating talk at last week’s IDF, run by Oban Multilingual. Here are some of my practical takeaways.

Whatever market you are approaching, make sure you have considered how these eight factors play.

If you’re interested to learn more about international digital marketing, check out Econsultancy’s training courses.

Island Records and Time Out launch NFC campaigns

After looking at the pros and cons of NFC (near field communication), it’s clear there’s a place for tapping to enjoy content as well as to pay for products.

However, the customer’s willingness to tap a poster with their phone is dependent on how well many initial NFC campaigns are carried out. Some clunky efforts, with terrible landing pages and insufficient incentives have risked putting users off for good.

This is changing as brands start to use the technology in better surroundings and to better purpose. A mall is the perfect environment to encourage users to tap with their friends.

To that end, from this week, shoppers can “turn on, tap and enjoy” content and competitions at Westfield shopping centres in London through CBS Outdoor digital pods, which use Proxama’s TapPoint NFC platform.

The battle for identity on the web

As marketers we are clearly interested in who our customers are. We care about who owns, and has control over, our customer data. The rise of digital channels offers new opportunities to capture customer data and, indeed, different kinds of data such as behavioural, or social, signals. 

But there is a battle for identity, and customer data, already under way that looks set to escalate. As the gods of the internet tear the firmament asunder we must consider the implications for us mere marketing mortals.

Tap on the map? Maybe I was wrong about NFC

I recently wrote about mobile NFC being dead in the water. Since then a few dissenting voices have piped up. Understandably, some working in this area. 

One of the voices was Proxama’s. It runs TapPoint, which is a cloud-based SAAS. I spoke to the MD, Miles Quitmann, and he was refreshingly honest enough to turn my oil tanker of beef around and leave me excited about the possibilities of loyalty ‘on tap’. 

So here’s a summary of emerging possibilities for marketers, using the growing number of NFC enabled smartphones in the market.

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