If you look at the user experience of paying with your credit card at a retail cash register versus tapping your phone, mobile is perhaps marginally faster or more convenient than the old credit card swipe. I do not see which consumer pain is addressed here. There is no payment friction. But on eCommerce sites, it usually takes 5-11 pages to checkout and pay and takes 3 to 11 minutes to do. We lose 12% of transactions because the process is too slow or too cumbersome. This is where the payment friction is.

In mCommerce, where purchasers are buying on mobile enabled sites on their smartphones, Google says the shopping cart abandonment rate is a whopping 97%. Who wants to type credit card, billing and shipping info on tiny keyboards? And NFC is no good here either.

QR codes are great for omni-channel payment experience, i.e. the same user experience whether you are paying online, offline or retail. NFC can not match the reach of QR codes.

While many have had less than pleasant experience with QR codes as they are sometimes hard to scan, especially with older smartphones, good engineering can go a long way in changing perceptions. Just watch some the videos on http://www.sekur.me. You’ll see the fastest scanning QR codes in the business. You can checkout and pay in under 10 seconds, without entering any information. This is how you can solve the payment friction problem and QR codes are the best solution, not NFC.