Serendipity strikes again. It's often the unexpected results from research that can prove the most interesting. This seems to be the case with an experiment conducted by Jonathan Stark - Mobiquity's Vice President of Application Architecture.
Jonathan has been gearing up for the Google Wallet by researching paying things with his iPhone. This involved trying out the Starbucks My Card app on his iPhone 4. He found the process generally good but the needless to say the user experience around registration and set-up was not ideal. This seems to be a common problem for mobile payment apps and might deter some. Anyway, his experiment proved interesting on number counts, one anticipated and the others less so.
Loyalty behaviour induced by reward - increased visits to Starbucks rewarded by loyalty points. While this is not a new insight, it does demonstrate that the combination of mobile payments with loyalty and offers programmes will be a compelling proposition for many retailers.
Jonathan then downloaded the Android version of app to his Nexus S but discovered he could not have one Starbucks payment card associated with two phones. To get round this he took a screenshot of his Starbucks barcode from his iPhone version and emailed it to his Nexus and saved it has an image. He then bought a coffee using an image of the barcode - not the actual barcode in the app. Essentially buying something with a picture. Interesting. Shifting the notion of methods of payment - highly portable and transferable.
He then blogged about this and included the screenshot of his Starbucks barcode. He had loaded his card with $30 and offered readers of his blog to use it to purchase a coffee. He asked people to limit purchases to $3:00 and to let him know how it went. The results were interesting.
- People not associated with him could use an image of his unique barcode to purchase a coffee. He was essentially broadcasting money!
- He discovered that his balance was increasing. People were topping-up his account!
Jonathan then wrote a bot that posted to Twitter every 15 minutes broadcasting how much money was on the card so that people would know before using it.
It seems that after 5 days, Starbucks shut the account. What's interesting is that an image of a unique barcode could be used to make a payment. That the payment could be made by anyone. It's also interesting to see the behaviours demonstrated by people using his card; the gratitude, the kindness, the sharing and the topping-up of the account.
You can read all about his experiment on his blog, here are a couple of links:
http://jonathanstark.com/blog/2011/06/20/mobile-payments-starbucks-app/
http://jonathanstark.com/blog/2011/07/14/broadcasting-mobile-currency/