HEADLINE NEWS
France: Merchant to Launch Large Tag-based Mobile-Shopping Trial
The project will enable participating shoppers to load products into a digital shopping basket on their smartphones by tapping the phones on tags embedded in any of 25,000 electronic shelf labels in a Casino supermarket in Paris. They would then upload the basket at the checkout counter by resting the phone on an NFC reader. By tapping the tags, shoppers could also get more information on the products. And using the retailer’s “mCasino” smartphone app, the consumers could set alerts to tell them, for example, if a product contains any ingredients they are allergic to, or if their mobile shopping basket is nearing their preset budget limit. The app also tells shoppers about discounts, which would be taken off the price of the product in the mobile shopping basket, not at the checkout counter. The app will be available for Android and BlackBerry NFC phones along with the iPhone through use of an NFC attachment, iCarte. But users will have to pay for their purchases separately, since NFC payment is not integrated into the app and no secure element is involved in the trial.
The trial is part of a larger push by groupe Casino, one of France’s largest retailers, to enable mobile shopping. But Casino is not enabling payment or integrating any payment service with its mobile app since, at least for the present, it wants to avoid working with mobile operators or renting space on their SIM cards.
* Trusted Service Manager: Defined loosely to include companies or other organizations securely distributing, provisioning and managing applications, generally over the air, on secure elements in NFC mobile phones; or licensing their platforms for this purpose.
N/A: Not available or not applicable.
Last update: Sept. 2012












