Will Google Hands Free Prevail Over Apple Pay
A few weeks ago, Google announced the pilot program of Hands Free in bay area. Hands Free is a mobile service that allows you to pay in stores without taking out your phone. It’s a very exciting product (in my point of view), and I decided to try out both Apple Pay and Hands Free in the same week to get a better understanding.
APPLE PAY
To set up Apple Pay, I simply went to the Wallet app on my iPhone to add a credit or debit card. After I clicked the plus icon to add a card, it briefly explains how Apple Pay works, and then it asked me to add a card to my account in order to use it. It’s certainly nice that I can take a screenshot of my card so that the app will capture the card number automatically, but I realize I still have to manually enter other information like expiration date, and if it’s not a traditional card (i.e. some cards have the card numbers on the back), the app won’t recognize it.
As I was looking for an opportunity to use Apple Pay, I happened to visit a friend at Apple last week. Unsurprisingly, when I was getting coffee from Caffe Mac, the barista highly encouraged me to use Apple Pay in order to support the company’s relatively new product.
After I ordered my coffee, the barista handed me a POS machine similar to the one in the image below, and all I needed to do was to wave my phone over it. I paid with my Touch ID and my phone vibrated after less than 1 second (it happened really fast) to confirm the transaction was completed. I also received a notification right after I paid.
I did enjoy the experience because it was fast and convenient. I always pay with the mobile app at Starbucks, and 5 out of 10 times, I will have to keep adjusting my phone to the sensor in order to complete a transaction. When I was using Apple Pay, I didn’t have this problem at all, and the entire process only took a couple seconds.
GOOGLE HANDS FREE
Hands Free was first introduced at Google I/O last year, and the company launched the pilot program in south bay earlier this month. The idea behind Hands Free is that no more pressing or clicking, you can pay without actually taking out your phone. It uses a combination of bluetooth, wi-fi, geo-location and other sensors to run the whole process.
Hands Free is currently available on both iOS and Android. I downloaded the app from App Store, and as soon as I opened it, it already had my account set up inside the application.
After I hit continue, I went through a simple step by step tutorial about how Hands Free works.
As you can see in the tutorial, the cashier confirms by comparing the photo the user uploads against the person at the checkout counter, using the special camera with the visual identification function. Therefore, I had to either upload or take a photo and store it in the application in order to use Hands Free. After adding a photo, I was asked to enter my payment information. Since I have stored my payment information in Google Play before, Hands Free detected the credit card and I could decide whether I wanted to use the same one or not. If you don’t have payment information stored in any of your Google accounts yet, you will just have to manually enter it in the app.
After adding the payment, I finally got to the homepage of the app where I could see my recent purchases and a list of stores available for Hands Free. The other nice thing about Hands Free is that you can see not only the stores but also where they are located. If you want to head over the store now, you can go to Google Maps from the Hands Free app simply by clicking the direction icon.
After I set up Hands Free, I couldn’t wait to use it, and luckily, Hands Free is actually available at Tin Pot, one of my favorite ice cream places in bay area.
After I got to the checkout, I said the magic words — “I’d like to pay with Google”. The cashier was a bit surprised, and then she quickly started the process. After about 1 second, the transaction was completed, amazingly fast. Just like advertised, I didn’t have to take out my phone during the entire time.
Like Apple Pay, I also received a notification about my transaction right away, and I could also see the receipt in my Hands Free app. In fact, Google has a $5 promotion for new users right now, so I ended up getting my ice cream for free!
Overall, I like the experience with Hands Free a lot, maybe even more than Apple Pay. First of all, I really like the fact that I can check what stores accept Hands Free right in the app so I don’t have to look it up online myself. The reason I haven’t used Apple Pay till now was that I don’t really know exactly what stores accept Apple Pay, and sometimes I am just not aware of the option. Second, if we do try to make payments more convenient for consumers in the future, Hands Free will definitely be my #1 choice.
I was certainly happy about my experience on both Hands Free and the ice cream I got at Tin Pot (earl grey favor is the best) ;)
FINAL THOUGHTS
There are many many aspects of the payment industry and I am no expert in this area. Therefore, I won’t go into details in this blogpost, and I will just focus on some thoughts I have about these two products.
Awareness
Apple Pay was first introduced in September 2014 and by late 2015, according to Trustev, only about 20.7% of Apple Pay users have actually tried it. Of those who have tried it, around 56% said that they use it once a week on average and 15.3% said they “never” use it during the week. While this survey might not represent all Apple Pay users, it still gives us a rough idea on Apple Pay’s market adoption. In fact, in a re/code article today, it’s said that Apple Pay’s launch was actually three times bigger than in the states. Apple Pay users added 3 million payment cards to the wallet app within the first 72 hours after its launch in China, versus Apple Pay users in the U.S. added only 1 million cards in the first 72 hours after its launch. Judging by how fast we are adopting EMV in the U.S. right now, it’s possible that the market itself might have made it more reluctant for merchants to adopt Apple Pay and difficult for customers to become aware of its availability.
On the other hand, Hands free did a good job by listing the stores within the app. Users can look up a specific store if they want to try it out and even getting directions to the store by opening Google Maps from there. In fact, when I was at Tin Pot and opened the Hands Free app, I noticed that the app was telling me I was at Tin Pot with its location function. I am not sure whether this feature exists or not, but if users can receive a notification when they’re at a store that accepts Hands Free, it will be very helpful because at least they are aware of the service and encouraged to use it.
User Experience
Personally, I didn’t have trouble using Apple Pay since I used it at Caffe Macs, so I didn’t experience any issues described in some of the online articles. However, when it comes to payment, we often have to consider the perspective of many different parties such as the merchants, the banks, the customers, etc. For instance, last week there was a great article on Apple Pay’s adoption problem on The Verge that described how merchants refused to use Apple Pay because of insufficient training and broken processes such as software updates. Even though most Apple Pay users thought the experience was great, they didn’t continue to use it, because they couldn’t use the app at all the locations that are supposed to accept Apple Pay. When the user experience becomes inconsistent, the survival of the product becomes a serious problem.
Currently, there’s not much information on Hands Free since the pilot just launched 2 weeks ago. Security has always been the main concern of any kind of new payment products, and the one thing that does concern me about Hands Free is the facial recognition. According to Google, merchants use a special camera with a facial verification algorithm at the checkout to confirm it’s the same user in order to complete the transaction securely. However, we are still not certain if the algorithm is truly working properly and whether external factors like lighting can affect the verification, since the product is still in its early stage. Furthermore, the cashier was supposed to ask for my initials besides using the camera for verification, but she didn’t. Therefore, proper training of using Hands Free on the merchant side can also be an issue.
Without knowing too much about potential issues that customers and merchants might encounter when they use Hands Free, it’s difficult to determine whether the user experience is truly satisfying on both sides. It’s possible that merchants that accept Apple Pay will be open to using Hands Free. On the customers’ end, if Hands Free can ensure the security and tackle the challenges Square and Paypal (they both rolled out similar products before) faced in the past, it’s very likely customers will choose Hands Free over Apple Pay.
The future of payments
If you know a little bit about Product Management, you might have heard of the terms Painkiller and Vitamin. Many people might argue that Apple Pay and Hands Free are more a Vitamin type of product and we don’t need neither of them, but we also would have never imagined that we would rely on products like Facebook or Uber (or Lyft) so heavily a decade ago.
However, if we have keyless cars, why can’t we have hands free payments? Nowadays, I don’t have to take out my car key every time I open or start my car anymore, and the keyless feature actually makes it more difficult for people to steal a car that way. Personally I think Google Hands Free will be what the future of payments is gonna look like, and it just depends on how long it will take us to get there. It’s foreseeable that wallets or payment cards will become obsolete, and we will embrace a future of hands free payments.
