I am reading that because of Covid, people are being encouraged to use their cell phones to pay at stores - it is supposedly “touchless.” Applepay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay are examples of this…
I was thinking of finally giving in and trying Samsung Pay. But I had a question…
Do you have to actually “touch” the phone to the card reader? I have seen conflicting info. Some stories claim you don’t, and some do.
Also, when I watch the Youtube videos on Samsung pay - it seems that these people ARE touching the phone against the card reader (which kinda defeats the purpose of trying to not touch the reader).
It is hard to tell if ya gotta actually touch the phone to the card reader. Anyone here use Samsung Pay that can comment?
Samsung Pay works n the same way as Google Pay and Apple Pay - via NFC, so you don’t have to touch. Some readers may not be as sensitive and requires the phone to be closer.
Yes, you don’t have to touch, but you have to be within a couple of cm of the device, to it is easy to touch it accidentally. Most people I see lay their card on the reader.
Not fully true… or at least it did not use to be. Samsung bought a technology that allowed the phone to simulate the magnetic patterns of a magstripe for magstripe readers. I’m sure they also support NFC, but they were known to work in more places because they didn’t use to require NFC (when many terminals in North America did not have it yet.) I don’t know if all that is still true.
It’s built into the phone for payment terminals that don’t support NFC but could scan a magstripe. It would depend on a bank if they allow magstripe in a case where NFC would be available.
You can easily be forgiven @Pommster for not relating to America’s backwards payment situation… NFC is still somewhat rare there by all accounts. So magstripe simulation was viewed as a workaround.
HaHa mandatory, how, or where? In the US they’re not properly mandatory. The theory is they shifted responsibility (i.e. cost) of fraud to merchants who didn’t update their equipment to accept chip and PIN, but I think many merchants are not there yet… no doubt because it costs money to replace terminals that are otherwise working fine. Most merchants are either still doing magstripe only, or are doing chip and NO PIN and of course more and more over time are doing it with chip and PIN. One presumes if they could add NFC to any terminal and card irrespective of chip and/or PIN… but I don’t know I’ve ever seen a card with NFC and no chip.
Over here, the banks haven’t issued non-Chip cards for over 15 years and all bank cards issued over the last 5 - 6 years are NFC enabled. I have one debit card left that isn’t NFC enabled, it was issued about a month before the switch-over and expires at the end of this year.
My debit card doesn’t even have a mag stripe. I believe that the credit cards still have to have mag stripes for countries that haven’t moved into the 21st century yet…
Same. Although the cards here do seem to still have a thin mag stripe, when you try and use it at a terminal here, it tells you to insert the card. Maybe just there for compatibility when travelling.
First contactless card I saw was about 12 years ago before I moved to Australia. It was a Barclaycard in the UK.
I’ve done over a $100 at a pet supply shop on contactless payments. I’m not in Canadia, but is that a rule over all of Canada? Or might it be at only certain stores?
Our banking system is much different than yours. We basically have 5 major nationwide banks (and a few smaller localized credit unions.) So usually the rules, per bank, are nation wide, and all five tend to “collude” a lot on the rules, or so it seems.
The limit is for PIN-less transactions, so up to the limit I don’t have to enter a PIN. Above that, a PIN is needed. The recent increase in the limit is so that touching the terminal is minimised, although every store I’ve been to have been sanitising the terminals after every transaction.
