I think QR is slightly worse since I have to open my camera app, or open my payment app and select camera, vs just waving my watch/phone at a terminal.
Things like metro payments are 100% doable with NFC and would be an awful nightmare with QR.
Back when AliPay and others were scaling up not too many phones had NFC.
However, more importantly, QR is way better from merchant's stand point. A static QR code is a thing of beauty. A tiny mom-and-shop merchant could take a printout and stick it up on their physical store front. It allowed AliPay to onboard of hundreds of thousands of merchants with minimal or no operations team on the ground. This strategy was almost 100% replicated in India by Paytm and their ilk. It was incredible to see even the smallest of shops with a printed QR codes stuck to their push carts, rickety shops etc.,
Or they go the other way and they’re scanning your QR code.
Basically, it isn’t actually better than NFC, just different. And maybe a little worse for speed, but better for donations or things that anything is better than nothing.
At the next level up, of course, vendors will have their own phone so they can check their notifications to make sure that a payment went through. And that is a big step forward for vendors in developing countries - there's no risk of receiving counterfeit currency with electronic transactions.
If the currency is good enough to fool a street vendor, it’s probably good enough to spend with their suppliers. Not like they’re sticking it in a bank. I suspect those street vendors are also not accepting bills so large they’re worth counterfeiting.
Chargeback fraud of course being more likely with credit card payments - but again, unlikely for small vendor transactions. It’s not worth it for anyone.
The argument that people don’t carry cash anymore is certainly real enough - and the beggars/window washer at a red light types are the most impacted rather than real merchants.
As someone who has visited China, it truly feels like stepping back in time when coming to the U.S. with regards to payments.
weird, must be a regional thing. both NFC cards and apple pay are pretty reliable for me. as for speed, I don't see how getting out your credit card and waving it next to a terminal can be slower than getting out your phone, unlocking it, opening wechat, selecting the qr scanner, lining up the camera, waiting for it to focus/scan, and confirming the transaction.
Just like the phone made wrist watches and portable music devices obsolete, it's also made the wallet obsolete. I agree that both NFC and QR code are equally convenient (although obviously QR codes are more accessible because they work on all phones and no special scanning devices are required), but I think the main issue is with NFC in a card versus NFC in a phone. The phone is always going to be more convenient, because people today are rarely - if ever - without their phone.
Regarding NFC, I've just seen too many times of having to put the phone in the right place in the right orientation to get the communication to work, and then it still takes time to make the payment. It's faster than credit cards when it just works but slower when it doesn't. And Alipay and WeChat are faster than both.
In China, you don't need a wallet. You just need a phone. So you get used to knowing what you need. There's an initial learning curve, but then you can be paying and biking around and everything else with just your phone.
The answer is they don't do that - and they do it the other way around. The user shows THEIR QR code to the merchant (or automated kiosk).
Which means they still need a terminal - and it's going to be slower than NFC.
And NFC works when my battery dies.
Pretty easy to fake a receipt.
QR codes seem to have largely supplanted cash and credit cards in mainland China, whatever hypothetical downsides they might have. And the very limited hypothetical advantages of NFC (it's unclear to me what they actually are, but let's grant they exist) don't compensate for the fact that an expensive terminal is needed, so NFC isn't displacing QR codes in the near future.
NFC terminals aren’t expensive - especially since they can be a cheap phone now.
QR without validating payment received is probably only viable up to maybe $10USD before the risk of being defrauded is too high.
I bet you’ll find lots of one way QR shops have a phone that they verify they’ve received payment on anyway.
And, yeah, most places do verify based on another phone.
China netizen population is estimated around 900 million. So essentially all adults in Urban and many in rural excepting small kids. Generally for the elderly, their kids or grand kids will help.
Some merchants, like street merchants or drivers, will simply have their code printed out. You scan it and pay them and they get a notification on their phone or tablet that you've paid. Other places, like at bigger restaurants, have QR screen readers that will scan the purchaser's phone.
Either way, I don't see what you're getting at. The terminal is the phone in many cases, and other cases, there is a terminal in the sense of an integrated scanner system, but why does that matter? For the user it is much more convenient and faster. It's essentially instant, and I have never waited for the amount of time it takes for a credit card or NFC payment method to process. Further, it allows basically anyone to have this method because, again, the terminal is your phone and can be so for both parties in the transaction.
> And NFC works when my battery dies.
So what? You can charge your phone essentially anywhere in China.
By and large when I've used these systems, the vendor just checks they received the correct amount of payment in their app. It's largely immediate
I think I need to restate the well-known: the gulf between reasonably easy and zero effort is quite large, and crossing it changes a lot in user behavior.
Pointing a camera at something that deducts money from you seems extremely ripe for abuse, what’s to stop someone from putting fake QR code’s over real ones and hijacking payments?
I'd say that paying with a contactless card has a problem here, an NFC credit card lacks a confirmation button, and the one on the terminal is controlled by the receiving party.
That doesn't solve the "Stripe, Inc" issue. https://web.archive.org/web/20170715000000*/stripe.ian.sh
How would that work? If someone somehow put a fake QR code over a merchant's real one, the merchant or person you're paying would not get a notification when you scanned their code to pay them. Thus, both parties involved in the transaction would be alerted to the situation immediately. The wrong QR code would be tied to someone's account and be easily found by the system.
In that it doesn't shut off nearly a half of all smartphones, which don't have NFC (iphone has nfc, but that's a long story)