photo credit: BeauGiles
Coffee chain Starbucks is the latest big outlet planning to trial contactless payments, following fast food giant McDonalds’ first steps into the technology.
Starbucks is to begin accepting contactless payments using NFC built-in to credit and debit cards, with thanks to Barclaycard and Visa. The payments of up to £15 can be taken by a simple swipe of the card, without the need for entering a PIN (at least not for every transaction).
Starbucks are looking to trial this type of payment in Spring 2012, so it is a little behind some of its competitors such as Costa Coffee, but will no doubt hope to jump on the NFC bandwagon that could come as a result of the NFC payment and ticketing that’s planned for the London Olympics.
There are other reasons that Starbucks will be keen to build up a user base of contactless payers – there is huge potential for tracking regular clients, their purchasing habits and the ability to offer them personalised discounts and deals based on the data they can gather from NFC.