I’m looking forward to my next trip to Richmond which will be before the end of the month. A dozen businesses in the high street, including cafes, restaurants, shops, a hotel and even a fish and chip shop now accept PayPal, but not the traditional enter you user name and password. PayPal “Check In” enables you to pay with your face!
The PayPal app for Android, Windows and even Apple’s iOS phones now lets customers check in to pay. The app highlights nearby shops and restaurants that accept PayPal and once checked in, your name and photo appears on the shop’s payment system. All customers need to do is check in on the app by dropping a pin on a retailer. The customer agrees the amount to be paid, the cashier charges them by clicking on their image and the customer gets an alert on their phone to let them know how much they’ve paid, as well as PayPal’s usual email receipt.
If you’re in Richmond you can pay with your face and PayPal at Cook & Garcia, The Farmery, The Tea Box, The Bingham Hotel, Revolution, Caffé Paolo, The Cedar Coffee Shop, Urban Diner, Pier 1 Fish and Chips, Noble Jones, Hill Café and Knot Coffee and Pretzel.
Check in is designed to save time for both customers and businesses. The customer doesn’t have to find their wallet to make a payment, and there’s no need to dash to the cash machine, write a cheque or wait for change. For businesses it means quicker transactions for your customers and not having to turn away sales for those without enough cash on them, both of which benefit the bottom line.
Rob Harper, Head of Retail Services at PayPal, said, “PayPal first brought ‘pay by mobile’ to the UK high street two years ago. Through our Richmond initiative, we’re pleased to help local businesses of all sizes offer a new more personal experience, while never having to turn away customers who don’t have enough cash on them to pay. Now locals in Richmond can leave their wallet or purse at home and be the first in the country to use their profile picture to pay“.
Whilst you’ll have to travel to Richmond to be one of the first to try the new PayPal Check In, it’s expected to gradually roll out across the UK. PayPal reckon that by 2016 you will be able to leave your physical wallet at home and just walk up the high street and be able to pay with your smartphone. For those that can’t make the trip to Richmond here’s a video showing how it works:
19 Responses
So where are you going to eat?
mmmm the farmery, you don’t know what you’ve started 😮
Hi my name is Dave. I mean, you can pay on your phone with paypal, and i sell mens and ladies bum creams. I think its great because you dont need money and you can pay and its easy and efficient. I can demo my product with one hand whilst charging with the other.
I like the way paypal always makes me pay for chargebacks and i never win a case, and they charge me £15 for a case i will 100% loose its so efficient and i dont even have to lift a finger.
We also use paypal on our website and ebay store. ‘Bumcreamsrus.com’ and so we get a superdeal.
My favourite feature is when a buyer opens a case, does not send a product back, and asks for ebay to review it and the customer gets to keep the product whilst paypal refund my money to them aswell.
Plus as a special bonus i get a really big negative feedback to show that ive lost my product and my money and to show that i even dared to stand up for myself. I got a few so i think its shows what a great strong character i am, that i wont give into blackmail so easily.
THANKS PAYPAL !
People have to be mad to accept this payment method in store for anything worth more than £10 SERIOUSLY PEOPLE GET REAL !
What happens when a customer says they physically returned a product and have not. Similar to the empty box scam on eBay they choose to do nothing about and posted all over youtube.
eBay/paypal will charge the merchant everytime.
Stay away from the high street paypal. The glossy its all good advert doesn’t fool me.
eBay/paypal value merchants about as much as wet fart on a sunday morning.
This maybe an ok idea if you sell coffee at a 500% mark up.
But for any real value products when you have alternatives.
This ebay company with its record of treating merchants like turds.
Paypal? Seriously!
I dont think so.
I went to Richmond and visited the castle and walked round the cobbled market square but couldn’t find any of the shop listed!
🙂
Oh that’s right – no where north of Watford exists 🙂
our thoughts too
no chance of accepting PAYPAL
in our shop when a nice crisp tenner is available, from any ugly bugger regardless of the photoshopped picture they present
sod off is what we will say to paypal
When I read the item and especially after I saw the video I could not really see the point of buying a coffee(not that I drink coffee) or indeed any other small purchase on a card(or Paypal via a smartphone). It just does not ring true to me.
But there again I am well into my sixties and am used to having a few quid in my pocket.
Where it might be attractive to me is if I was walking around a store(lets say a furniture store) and I saw something that I really wanted and the price was right. But will all the problems with Paypal that others have touched upon I would think the Shop-Keeper to be bonkers if he was to accept Paypal for a Large Instore purchase.
So I think that I will not sign up and if I was to bring my stall out of retirement then I doubt if I would sign up to take Paypal over the counter either.
This is a pointless solution looking for a problem that contactless payment systems in both cards and phones solved years ago.
Frankly I don’t want a new personal experience with my local ‘barrista’ or coffee shop owner.
All I want is a decent expresso for around one euro like the rest of Europe.
paypal have so much money they can keep throwing it all sorts of ideas in the hope that someday one of them may work. they dont seem to understand that a safe method of payment on the internet does not transfer to the high st that well, its not really needed
real money got there first ,thousands of years ago, even if money did not ,visa /mastercard got there decades ago