About a year ago, Rogers Communications
began pilot testing of a mobile payment system, one that would allow customers to pay bills with a tap-and-go smartphone service. Joining the race to get Canadians to make purchases without opening their wallets: PayPal, which launched a pilot of its own last month in Toronto.
PayPal's partner is
TouchBistro, an iPad based point-of-sale system used by many food trucks, cafes, and restaurants. Customers who check in with the new service can pay their restaurant bills from their PayPal accounts via an app on their mobile phones.
Jimmy's Coffee is one of the venues that has been participating in the pilot. Manager Penny Vine says that so far the experiment has been going relatively well—right now about $100 a day are processed through the PayPal/TouchBistro system.
PayPal makes money on the system by collecting a small percent of each bill that is processed, which means that the lower price point of cafe sales isn't as lucrative for them as full-fledged restaurants. TouchBistro approached Jimmy's and asked them to participate in the pilot, however, simply because their more frequent sales—nearly 400 transactions a day—gives them a bigger sample size to learn from.
From Jimmy's perspective, explains Vine, the pilot was appealing because the cafe doesn't have the capacity to process credit card transactions, and this gives them an alternative electronic option for customers without cash. The mobile payment system, Vine says, "is great because at the actual point-of-sale it's really fast. It's easy…and it's cheaper than taking credit cards."
This, however, only works if customers check in before they arrive at the counter—if they aren't ready the payment process can take a bit of time. It's mostly a question of visibility, Vine thinks, pointing out that "people don't really know much about it yet." She also notes that the system only works if the technologies that support it do: if the app goes down, or a customer's phone network is on the fritz, mobile payments won't work.
Jimmy's is so far seeing more advantages than downsides: Vine says they would definitely be interested in keeping the system once the pilot is over.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Penny Vine, Manager, Jimmy's Coffee