Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Groupon, Intuit, Square: it’s all about mobile payments

Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Groupon, Intuit, Square: it’s all about mobile payments.

As Amazon does auctions, eBay and Walmart are both transforming itself into a general marketplace like Amazon. 

Intuit is trying to monetize it’s SMB franchise, channel and direct sales capacity with Quickbooks and Square continues to march on by giving out it’s free mag readers and buying tremendous marketing air-time.

The question is what’s at stake here?  The answer is simple, the hearts, minds and wallet share of commerce (eCommerce and Bricks and Mortar) as we know it.  That’s all

My wife was looking for a new ottoman for her office. We went to the traditional B&M retailers found nothing.  Ended up buying it on Overstock.com.  Free shipping, better price, great reviews, great product, no sales tax.  All and all a great experience and without having to deal with a furniture sales person.

B&M retailers’ likeTarget and Walmart offer and sell more stuff from their websites than they do in their stores.  And for good reason, no inventory carrying costs, no stale merchandise, no sales clerks, no floor space.  Because of advanced web personalization, they know infinitely more about you as an online shopper than they will ever know about you as some schmo who walks into a store.  They can use that intelligence to target, personalize and up sell at will without somebody in a red vest laying a guilt trip and asking you if you want to donate to breast cancer today.

But why mobile payments?  2.75% is why.  There’s a whole underground economy that today is not participating in credit cards.  Cab drivers, hairstylists, street vendors that is they had an easy to use, and relatively painless way to collect credit cards they would.

I personally would love to have access to my Paypal account that I already use to pay for stuff on eBay and virtually every other website that takes it at my disposal when I buy and sell stuff in person. 

Copyright 2012: Kevin Chew