Author: JT

McDonald’s teams with Ant Financial in order to support mobile shoppers

McDonald’s has partnered with China’s Ant Financial, a subsidiary of Alibaba, in order to support mobile payments. The company sees major promise in China’s mobile commerce market, especially as consumers begin to look for ways to pay for products in a convenient fashion. Some 2,100 of McDonald’s stores in China will now be accepting payments made through Alipay, which is the country’s most prominent mobile payments service.

Company has plans to fully support mobile payments in China by 2016

McDonald’s stores in Shanghai will be the first to begin supporting mobile payments. By March of 2016, all of the company’s stores in China will be accepting mobile transactions. Ant Financial suggests that consumers using Alipay can complete a transaction in only two seconds, which will ensure that they have access to a convenient service. In order to initiate a mobile transaction, consumers will only have to scan QR codes, which have become prominent tools in the mobile commerce space.

Alibaba continues to show aggressive support of the mobile commerce market in Asia

Alibaba has been playing a major role in Asia’s mobile commerce space. The company has already established a dominant lead in the Chinese e-commerce space and has moved aggressively into the mobile payments field. Recently, Alibaba announced that it was investing more money into India’s mobile commerce market, forming a deal with that country’s leading mobile payments company, Paytm. The deal is estimated to be valued at $680 million and is expected to have a major impact on how Paytm supports the growth of mobile commerce in India.

McDonald’s stores in the US already support mobile payments made through various services

In the United States, McDonald’s has already become involved in the mobile payments space. The company accepts mobile transactions coming from a variety of services, including Samsung Pay and Android Pay. In some cases, QR codes are used to initiate transactions, but NFC technology is also used as an effective way to engage consumers using their mobile devices to make purchases.

Those advertisements that have become a nuisance to the mobile web may be vital to its existence.

Among the frustrations that are the most common about the mobile web are the ads and automatically playing videos that cause us to have to wait excessive amounts of time for a page to load, but the ad blockers that have been providing relief from that experience may now be threatening the existence of some websites.

The reason is that many free sites depend on the display of advertising for their livelihood, to make them worthwhile.

iPhones and iPads now have the opportunity to be able to use apps that function as ad blockers and millions of mobile device users have chosen to download and install those applications to speed up their experience on the mobile web while avoiding annoying accidental ad clicks. At the same time, websites and publishers often depend heavily on advertising revenue in order to make their very existence worthwhile, as the ads pay for the amount of time that is put into maintaining them.

This has some sites watching the rise of ad blockers with bitten-down nails as their primary income is threatened.

Advertising revenue is vital to companies ranging from tiny to giant such as Google, The New York Times, and Hulu. While panic has yet to set in for the majority of websites, they certainly have their eye on this trend and some websites are already working hard to be able to reduce any annoyance that their ads may be causing so that their regular users won’t be driven to ad blocking altogether.

According to the Harvard University director of the Nieman Journalism Lab, Joshua Benton, “It is possible to be too alarmist about ad blockers, but it’s a very real phenomenon.” It all depends on the proportion of mobile device users who opt to install these apps. He explained that there will be a very big difference between having 5 percent or 80 percent of iPhone users installing these mobile apps.

He cautioned that if advertising practices become too annoying, it could lead consumers to take action through ad blockers in order to make them disappear, going the way of the pop-up window (a technique that is automatically blocked by many browsers due to user frustration).