Mobile payments are enjoying a lot of very good press right now and customers seem very keen on finally being able to use their phones to complete purchases. However there is a very important group of people which is not so keen on them and they are crucial to the development of the whole idea.
Recent study by RetailCustomerExperience.com has revealed that some 75% of merchants believe that we will need to wait at least another two years before this payment channel is ready for wide adoption.

According to the research the thing retailers worry about the most is downtime. Mobile payments require completely new processing and security setup as well as potentially new hardware being installed in stores. These will need to be thoroughly tested before they can be rolled out, or shop owners could risk not only upsetting customers but also spending a lot of their valuable time trying to fix any potential issues.

Early adopters will surely prove to be excellent testing cases, but they may not be using the same systems and hardware as the solutions being developed for the wider market. Also, there are many different types of mobile payments and right now we’re not even sure which ones have the biggest chance of striking a chord with the majority of shoppers.

Companies like Starbucks, who have decided to create their own system by marrying NFC (near-field communication) with mobile wallet, will surely provide a great learning curve to everyone involved in the development of any type of mobile payments. However the experience of one enterprise is unlikely to provide enough insight for an accurate judgement on how this payment method should develop. It will also not provide enough exposure to consumers and we need to understand their needs and demands first as they will ultimately have to decide whether mobile payments have a future or not.

To help overcome this gap in experience some marketers have spent a lot of time and money trying to convince shoppers about the advantages of various types of mobile payments and it now seems that this group has a lot more knowledge than retailers. This is now becoming a problem as business owners will arguably be a lot more thorough in their scrutiny of the new developments. They will need to understand the mechanics of mobile payments in order to be able to give proper service and assistance to shoppers; otherwise they will not agree to use it in their stores, stopping the whole notion before it even began.

Security will also be an aspect at which they will look very closely in order to not only protect customers but their businesses too.

As long as the shoppers have concerns and questions about this technology, its implementation will continue being pushed back and mobile payments will most likely remain on the fringes of payment channels.