Major Japanese Retailers Plan Mobile Phone Reward Card Trial
Written by Evan SchumanOctober 9th, 2008
Japan’s NTT and three large Japanese retail chains—Bic Camera, Nojima and Runsystem—confirmed Thursday (Oct. 9) a trial that the group says will “securely integrate the reward cards of more than 100 retailers into a single mobile phone.”
NTT will run the contactless card trial—called Gyazapo—from February to June 2009. “Once a dedicated application is downloaded into the phone, (the system) enables loyalty points, ID photos and other membership information of multiple retailers to be registered under a single platform,” according to an NTT statement.
The mobile challenge is less about supporting the devices and more about having the skill and tenacity to integrate the ordering app into the multitude of POS networks/software iterations.
-Dan Stiel