Despite the growing popularity of mobile payment apps like Apple Pay and Android Pay, over the past couple years, retail stores have been slow to adopt them.

A little more than a third of consumers (36 percent) have used some form of mobile payment applications in the past year.

Source: Walker Sands Future of Retail Study 2016

Despite the lack of enthusiasm in embracing this technology, brick-and-mortar retail stores are trying to remove as much friction as possible from the payment process to eliminate consumer frustration and enhance the ‘buyer’s experience’.

To this end, retailers have adopted proprietary retail mobile apps that enable the customer to pay only in their stores (closed-loop payment).

Figure 1: Source: Walker Sands Future of Retail Study 2016

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Barcodes have been around for decades but strangely enough, the use of barcodes in mobile payments have only recently been picking up. Starbucks has been a pioneer in mobile payments using barcodes. Walmart and CVS have recently introduced a similar solution. Because of the embedded cameras, smartphones have been always capable of reading barcodes and that is one of the main reasons why barcodes are so ubiquitous.

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