EMV may finally be catching on in the United States
July 31, 2018
PIN on Glass
August 14, 2018
Imagine one day soon you are cooking your family’s dinner but oh no, you were out of an ingredient. The pot is already boiling and the kids are in the living room doing their homework so you can’t just get up and go to the grocery store. What do you do? Some will certainly just wing it and hope no one notices or pray that a neighbor has the ingredient but soon there may be another option.
How easy would it be to just go to your Alexa device and tell it to purchase the needed ingredient, which will then be placed on a drone and delivered to you? Dinner is saved! It sounds far fetched, almost in the realm of science fiction like something that Captain Kirk in Star Trek would be able to do but it could very well soon be a reality for you.
Amazon has already introduced a drone delivery service called Amazon Prime Air in select markets and UPS isn’t far behind. Also today Alexa can even be used to purchase certain items. Alexa will also remember items that are purchased like AA batteries so that they can be repurchased quickly. At the moment this service is available only to Amazon Prime members as well in select markets.
In the fourth quarter of 2017 Amazon posted record profits so CEO Jeff Bezos has announced that they would double down on voice technology. Google has followed suit and Apple has also stepped into this realm. For merchants that sell their goods through Amazon this could have major financial ramifications.
This will undoubtedly spur a new level of competition among merchants and retailers. When a customer asks for a jar of spaghetti sauce what will you get? Companies will pay big money so that they become the default brand. To shop a person may not longer need to leave their house and this will present a shopping experience that the Home Shopping Network could only dream of.
It is possible that within 5 years nearly half of all Internet searches will be done by a voice assistant like Alexa. This is a realm that many merchants and retailers may want to begin investigating now rather than later. As voice assistant purchasing expands away from just Amazon this could be something that takes credit card processing to new heights and opens up all kinds of doors for merchants.
