Retailers

Months after retooling its Amazon Go store checkout process to accommodate customers who prefer to pay with cash, the e-commerce giant had added a way for consumers to pay for Amazon e-commerce purchases with cash at U.S. Western Union outlets.

Retailers have raised the bar in how they attract customers through rewards and loyalty programs, but not all are well-versed in how their technology also lures fraudsters.

To accommodate Asian tourists, Banco Santander has launched JCB merchant acquiring operations in Spain after obtaining a license with JCB International, the international operations unit of the Japanese global payment brand.

Even without cryptocurrency, blockchain provides necessary security and processing benefits, says Tatvasoft's Vikash Kumar.

Apple keeps sweetening the deal for prospective Apple Card users, with Walgreens the latest to offer cash-back rewards.

Its newest offering is called Delivery Unlimited, which at $98 a year undercuts Amazon Prime's $119 fee.

Mobile order, delivery and payment apps are proliferating at restaurants, but they're also becoming less distinguishable, posing an entirely new challenge as deep discounts become the weapon of choice.

Researching how pain points make consumers work harder can fix payment execution, says UJET's Anand Janefalkar.

Starbucks’ latest innovation doesn’t include camera-driven invisible checkout and doesn’t even come from Seattle. But for rank and file retailers, it may prove even more informative than watching the progress of Amazon Go.

The world’s biggest restaurant company is buying startup Apprente Inc., a developer of voice-recognition technology for use in the restaurant industry, to help speed up lines. The idea is to eventually have a machine, instead of a person, on the other side of the intercom to relay orders to kitchen staff.

AiFi has partnered two global powerhouses in banking and groceries to pilot an Amazon Go-like convenience store in the Netherlands.

Mobile payments speed and convenience is more than an abstraction, and needs to be quantified, says UJET's Anand Janefalkar.

They’ve scrapped the newspapers and beefed up the food, but most Starbucks cafes in the U.S. don’t look all that different today than they did a decade ago. That’s about to change.

As bans on sports betting ease in more states, payment processors are counting on new revenue streams, particularly as the NFL season gets underway.

Amazon is reportedly testing technology that allows contactless payments via a hand gesture, applying technology that would provide valuable insight to fuel other initiatives such as Amazon Go.

Legacy retailers are starting to get serious about checkout-free technology, bringing new insights into the challenges inherent in replacing decades-old traditional checkout layouts at stores.

If the retail giants' Merchant Customer Exchange payments venture collapsed under the weight of trying to create a one-size-fits-all mobile wallet to bypass card networks, then the implosion of that joint venture was the best thing that could have happened.

It's unclear whether the Trump administration can or will declare a national emergency as part of the trade dispute between the U.S. and China, but the discourse alone could disrupt major business relationships that involve American retailers, payment companies and Chinese firms.

Amid success stories like Apple Pay, Google Pay and the Starbucks app, there are many wallet apps that failed to gain traction — or squandered it when they did. But there is a lot to learn from their experiences.

If firms don't enroll consumers quickly for card accounts, it suggests other elements of the institution may also be suspect, says Kofax's Dermot McCauley.