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Adoption of mobile payment shifts consumer spending patterns, habits
Paying for a cup of coffee with a smartphone instead of a credit card is gaining prominence among consumers – and is disrupting their spending patterns and consumption habits, according to new research co-written by a University of Illinois expert who studies operations management.
[...] Using a unique data set from one of the largest banks in China – which contained the transaction data from personal computer, offline and mobile payment channels – Xu and co-authors found that, on average, the total transaction amount increased by 2.4 percent after the adoption of the mobile payment channel, and that the total transaction frequency increased by more than 23 percent.
[...] “Switching to the mobile channel leads to more shopping overall, and it particularly affects more hedonistic shopping such as food, entertainment and travel,” Xu said. “But it doesn’t affect purchases like education or health care. So it’s changing consumer behavior.”
The greatest impact came on less costly items that are purchased frequently, such as beverages and movie tickets.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02 2018, @06:07PM (1 child)
May also be possible to track the serial numbers of bills from ATMs to self-pay machines. Even with human cashiers, the bank could still get data from the serial numbers when the store's night deposit is processed in the morning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @12:50AM
I've never seen anything more than hearsay that such a program exists. To begin with, given how often cash exchanges hands, the tracking would be entirely unreliable.