An NFC mobile shopping application developed by mobile financial services provider SafePay Systems has achieved an overall satisfaction rate of 90% with shoppers who used the service during a pilot at Hungarian bookstore chain Libri — and 96.4% said they would recommend the service to a friend.

NFC tags were attached to books across the Budapest-based store during the seven day trial. When tapping the tags after launching the Mobile Retail app, customers received detailed information including price, content summaries and book recommendations on their mobile phone.

The store's special offers and coupons were also broadcast to the shoppers via the app; a promotion contained either a link that housed details of an offer to be redeemed or a coupon that could be stored in the virtual shopping cart.

Shoppers also stored items they wished to purchase in the virtual shopping cart housed in the app. They could then continue to pay for their saved content using their mobile phone.

Andras Vilmos, managing director of SafePay, explained to NFC World: "The three ways to pay are remote mobile payment using regular bank cards. You make the payment with your mobile and you and the store's back-office receive real time payment confirmation.

"It works like a self-checkout [and] you do not need to go to the cashier. The security personnel may check what you were paying for with their mobile control application.

"Loyalty payment. For all your purchases you collect points which you may use to pay for your purchases if you have enough of them. Same thing like the mobile payment; online, remote transaction without the cash register or POS.

"Cash. The content of the virtual shopping basket is transferred to a cashier POS terminal. We need some integration here, however it is quite simple. The transaction details need to be transferred to the cashier system.

"The cashier needs to scan the transaction code on the mobile application and based on this code all the necessary product information will be sent to the POS as if these have been scanned individually in the traditional way."

413 respondents filled in a questionnaire about the service on offer, with over 90% saying they liked the service. 96.4% of the respondents said they would recommend the service to a friend and 86.2% said they would use the app in the course of their usual daily shopping.

Vilmos continued: "The physical retail space should provide most of the services and features that are available online. It is a framework app that can be tailored to any retail operation.

"The great thing about the solution is that it is beneficial for customers — it gives them more information, convenience and speed. For merchants, it is beneficial because they can learn a lot about their customers.

"Quite a number of people said they would prefer to shop in a store where such a service was available, rather than shop in a store that didn't offer the service. Over half said their shopping decision was influenced by the coupons and recommendations they received while shopping."