Tag: mobile commerce

The coffee giant is leading the way in this market as 10 percent of its American purchases use smartphones.

Despite the fact that Starbucks doesn’t have the most generous loyalty or reward programs around, it has most certainly been able to attract the largest number of people to its mobile payments program in the United States.

The minimalistic rewards program does not seem to be doing any damage to the willingness of its customers to pay with smartphones.

The company is continuing to draw new customers and a surprising number of them are using mobile payments to pay for their purchases, even in the United States, which is one of the markets in which the least growth and adoption have been seen. The café chain has continually broken the mold, not only by being successful with the transactions as a whole, but also by doing so using various different types of technique.

Mobile payments have seen considerable struggle with adoption in the United States.

Giants in the industry such as Isis and Google Wallet have essentially fallen flat, so far. Though Square is doing well, it requires mobile devices on the side of the seller, not the consumer. Starbucks, on the other hand, has experienced continual and rapid growth since it first introduced the transaction method.

Ten percent of all American transactions at Starbucks are currently completed using a smartphone. The company has been working very hard to be able to popularize mobile payments and it has managed to overcome the lack of trust that smartphone users have in the security of their devices by basing the system on rechargeable gift cards instead of relying the use of credit or debit cards through their devices.

That said, the actual reason behind the success of Starbucks mobile payments has yet to be identified. Though some have proposed the reward program associated with it, most would agree that it is not a very big incentive. Others feel that it is more convenient than paying through more traditional means. It has also been proposed that the demographic that buys coffee through that chain is also the same one that is more willing to give new technologies a try. Whatever it is, other American companies have yet to replicate it.

The furniture company is using the application to give a 3D display of how its products fit in a room.

IKEA shoppers will no longer need to rely solely on their imaginations when considering various furniture items for their homes, because of a new augmented reality app that will allow them to preview the piece in a 3D real time image.

Though walking through the store with a measuring tape is still important, it can also be very confusing.

Shoppers can’t always tell if a piece of furniture will fit properly into a room, or how it will look once it gets there, even when they have measured the space and the piece. Instead, they have been forced to rely on their imaginations and their memories to try to decide whether or not they are making the right choice. But IKEA intends to provide a helping hand through the use of augmented reality that can be used on a mobile device.

The augmented reality app from the Swedish furniture maker is Android and iOS compatible.

The new augmented reality feature to the app lets the 2014 catalog be used by the consumer along with his or her smartphone or tablet, so that they will be able to view in real time how a piece of furniture will look in one of the rooms of their home. Though this is not a perfect depiction of exactly how it will appear, it will certainly provide the shopper with a much clearer image of what they can expect, right there in their own homes.

According to the Ikea North America chief marketing officer, Leontyne Green Sykes, “While the hard copy is still relevant, allowing readers to tear out pages to create collages of the things they like, it’s also exciting to interact, throughout the year wherever you are, with a catalog when it becomes a mobile piece with a digital component.” The augmented reality feature is one that the CMO claims has been “desired by our users since we launched the app last year.” That first version of the app was downloaded by 8.5 million users last year.