Payment Options

Thanks to technology, shoppers have more power than ever. Prices and products are no longer enough to cement buying decisions. Instead, American consumers place higher value on — and demand more from — the shopping experience. This shift toward experience is one of the key findings in a new study that tracked the opinions, preferences…

Walmart has decided to cancel an app that let shoppers scan and pay for items with their smartphones so they could skip waiting in line at checkout registers, the company confirmed to Business Insider on Tuesday. The decision to kill the app, called Scan & Go, comes just four months after Walmart announced it would expand…

Amazon.com's cashier-free grocery store of the future is coming to San Francisco and Chicago. The company is expanding its experimental Amazon Go store to the two cities, but didn't say when they would open. It has posted job listings for store managers in the cities on its site, which were first noticed by the Seattle…

The subscription economy brings the need for a completely different approach to building and expanding a business. Driven by changes in purchasing behavior and consumer preference, the subscription economy is in full effect. The industry has grown 200 percent annually since 2011, and in 2017, subscription businesses attracted more than 11 million U.S. subscribers. Looking…

Amazon.com is reportedly offering discounted credit card fees to retailers that adopt Amazon Pay as an option for their customers, according to people with knowledge of the matter who spoke to Bloomberg. The Bloomberg report said that Amazon has offered the discounts to several smaller sellers with higher credit card fees than Amazon, which can negotiate…

Sears and Kmart announced today that they are expanding their LEASE IT program online, thereby becoming the only national full-service retailer to offer a full assortment of products to lease both online and in-store. The LEASE IT payment option, originally launched in-store at Sears and Kmart in 2012, enables shoppers who don't qualify for or…

Innovations in mobile and digital wallets over recent years have resulted in a proliferation of wallet models and solutions, all intended to improve customer convenience, leverage data, lessen friction or lower the cost of payments. The potential for increased growth of digital commerce is evidenced by the number of brick-and-mortar retailers that have introduced mobile…

A recent article on Total Retail by Mark Ryski titled Why Amazon Go is a ‘No-Go’ for Most Retailers caught my attention. Ryski’s article postulated that grab-and-go technologies would be too expensive and complex to implement for most retailers, and used Whole Foods’ footprint (average of 39,000 square feet) as an example. The issue I…

Innovations in mobile and digital wallets over recent years have resulted in a proliferation of wallet models and solutions, all intended to improve consumer convenience, leverage data, lessen friction or lower the cost of payments. Merchants and issuers looking to understand the key factors and considerations for developing a mobile or digital wallet strategy can find guidance in a new U.S. Payments Forum resource, Mobile and Digital Wallets: U.S. Landscape and Strategic Considerations for Merchants and Financial Institutions.

Google announced yesterday a new service designed to help retailers take on Amazon — and give Google a cut of their sales in the process. The service, Shopping Actions (formerly known as Google Express), gives consumers an easy way to shop for retailers’ products on the Google Assistant app and search via Google Search with…