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Comment by angrygoat | Hacker News Reader

Here in Australia, pretty much every retailer now has "paypass", which is the .au branding for contactless credit card payments.

Most payment terminals are connected to 3G or 4G mobile networks, and from tapping the card to confirmation of payment takes two seconds tops.

Transactions over $100 do require the PIN, but you can usually enter that on the terminal without being required to insert your card.

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Paypass is actually the Mastercard version of contactless payments. The name is used in other countries as well. Visa calls it payWave, maybe retailers just put up one of the names.

I believe you're right. In .au they call it PayPass, but in .nz they call it PayWave. I believe some old Visa machines didn't support MasterCard, or the other way round. All I remember is my flatmate complaining that his new debit card kept failing contactless payments.

Yeah for some reason paypass was just the one that stuck in the collective consciousness here. The points of sale have paywave branding too, but people call it paypass.

The truly weird .au thing is that many merchants take your card and tap it for you. A holdover from the days when people got confused by all the options in swiping/inserting and selecting an account.

I recall reading an article from last year, when NFC-based payment was introduced at the German supermarket chain Rewe. The author went out to test it, but the cashiers didn't know how it worked. The author himself figured it out for himself, and just started touching the phone to the cardreader at the appropriate moment, when the cashier was waiting for him to present either cash or a card. The cashiers were allegedly oftentimes confused by the reader beeping to indicate success, and two receipts being printed (instead of the usual three).

Also, while I was looking around to see whether I could find the original article, I saw an article describing that German banks want to eliminate traditional banking cards and do everything via NFC-enabled apps on smartphones. WHAT CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG.

Rewe is one of the better stores for this. Even though it didn't seem the staff was explicitly trained on that topic (the feature was just switched on one day), the register showed enough information that they knew exactly what to do. Never had any problems, only surprised looks. The other store is Aldi (actually both of them), where from day one every single cashier was trained very well on that and was happy to see a customer actually using it.

All the other stores created many opportunities for mistake by staff they badly trained and much confusion still happens today even long after the roll out. Most commonly, many cashiers demand a signature (on the back side of the receipt, where there is an authorisation text for using another payment technology) even though none is needed.

Ok, I'll bite: why on earth would German cash registers print 3 receipts by default? One for the customer, one for the store, and one for good luck?

Probably Händlerbeleg (Merchant receipt), Kundenbeleg (Customer receipt) and then a normal Kassenbon (just the receipt with what you bought) but I have only seen the two customer ones in one.

Many stores print one receipt for the goods you bought (which is yours to keep) printed by the register, and two receipts for the card transaction (so one for both) printed by the card terminal. This is mostly for historical reasons due to how card transactions were introduced to German merchants. They have stuck to that and still design new so-called "hybrid" terminals which have a receipt printer and take the card in for the full length (so the flow for magstripe and chip transactions is exactly the same with no confusion even though magstripe basically only happens for foreign cards now).

Smarter merchants print muss less: Rewe, which is used in the example, doesn't print receipts at all unless specifically requested by the cashier and then only one which contains both the goods bought and the card transaction data for the customer. A merchant receipt is only printed in case a signature is required.

Yeaah literally no cashier has ever seen these payments, apparently. H&M, Uniqlo, gas stations, Kaufland, Rewe, the list is just infinite.

I worked for 1 week at a Kaufland (you could compare it to Eroski/Carrefour/Walmart) as cashier and I have never seen anybody else except me pay contacless so no wonder they get surprised all the time :)

Had the same. Was shopping at a supermarket in Germany and was the first person to use it apparently. Was then forced to sign (even though there was no indication that I would have to sign and doing so doesn't make sense for contactless payments). I tried to protest but had to catch my train so scribbled something random..

> Yeah for some reason paypass was just the one that stuck in the collective consciousness here.

That seems to happen with bank product branding a fair bit. People _still_ talk about "pass machines" here; Bank of Ireland used to call its ATMs pass machines in the 80s/early 90s, and it stuck, for some reason.

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