A Boost to Mobile Shopping

On Monday, Stripe, an e-commerce start-up based out of San Francisco, announced a new product dubbed Relay. Relay will essentially allow retailers to sell goods on applications and social media outlets via mobile device more efficiently; by making in app purchases possible, and speeding up the checkout processes too. The article from the New York Times focuses on how Twitter will be soon to partner with businesses to sell goods via Relay technologies.

Efficiency is the focus of Relay and it will surely provide that, but how will consumers take to this?  On Twitter, formerly a picture of a product coupled with a link led to an outside website from the application, and a whole process of typing information to check out. This arduous process made buying products on your mobile device a hassle. Consumers, who know what they want and need it now, are already making purchases via Twitter, and will be pleased to see the old time wasting process gone with the coming of Relay. Naturally other users will be intrigued by this new technology, but I see this being used by those users who already made purchases from twitter links. 

One overlooked aspect though is how accounts will be have the ability to buy a product by simply being logged in and clicking on a tweet. Children could accidentally make purchases by tapping the screen the wrong way when using their parents phones, though there will surely be security measures to try and stop this, but that would cut into efficiency. Hackers could gain access to a twitter account with credit card or Paypal information tied to it, and steal important information. 

I can see Relay bringing change to mobile mobile shopping sphere but I don’t think it will change online shopping as a whole. Consumers who don’t know exactly what they won’t be able to compare prices, look at similar products from other brands through twitter, so they will have to revert the antediluvian way of going to an online store and sifting through products to find what their heart desires.

Sources: Issac, Mike. "Stripe Introduces New Tools to Simplify Mobile Shopping."Bits Stripe Introduces New Tools to Simplify Mobile Shopping Comments. New York Times, 14 Sept. 2015. Web. 17 Sept. 2015.