Mobile Phone App To Pay For Groceries In Tesco Checks Out
Paying for groceries just got even quicker in Tesco.
After a successful trial, the supermarket has announced the roll out of paying by mobile phone App to all of its stores.
All it takes is a quick flash of an on screen barcode at the till.
The App, called PayQwiq, does not depend at all on the availability of a signal.
The barcode which identifies the customer is embedded in the App and can be called on screen at any time.
Hold on, I hear you say, what if my mobile phone gets stolen?
Couldn’t anyone then rack up a huge grocery bill on my account?
The answer is that, just as with a loss of a credit card, you have to report it as quickly as you can.
However, this App has two advantages over the credit card loss.
Firstly you can sort it online rather than having to make a phone call.
Secondly, you can freeze your account temporarily and can unfreeze it again if you find the phone down the back of the sofa, unlike a credit card which can never be used again if you find it after reporting it lost.
Part of the set-up process has confused a number of users during the trial of the App, though.
Every App is tied to one or more bank accounts so that the bill can be charged.
The way Tesco test that their clockwork connects properly to each bank account is to run a dummy two pound transaction followed shortly by a refund.
This, of course, appears on the bank statements of customers.
Rivals Sainsbury’s, unsurprisingly, are testing their own version, so watch this space.
