TEST: An email promotes Tesco’s trial of Powatag payments at its Metro supermarket in Soho

UK supermarket giant Tesco is conducting a one week test of Powa’s PowaTag mobile payments technology at its Dean Street store in London.

To promote the service, a free lunchtime Meal Deal — comprising a main lunch item, a snack and a drink — was offered on 13 and 14 October to the first five hundred shoppers to download the PowaTag app and use it to pay with their mobile phone. Customers can then continue to use the app to make mobile payments until the end of this week.

“We are always testing new ideas to see how we can make the shopping experience better for our customers,” Tesco told NFC World+. “We are currently conducting a week-long experiment in one store in order to see how we might speed up purchasing and reduce queuing time for customers, and will see how we could apply some [of] these learnings into future store, checkout and technology designs.”

“This week’s event is a pilot for Tesco to see how well PowaTag performs before they decide how to move forwards,” PowaTag added. “They picked the Dean Street store specifically because it has a very high customer throughput.”

PowaTag has signed up 240 retail brands for the US$100m launch of its mobile commerce service and acquired mPayMe, developer of the Znap mobile payments service, for US$75m in June 2014.