M&S has today announced the rollout of its popular checkout-free shopping technology ‘Mobile Pay Go’ to all UK stores – meaning customers all over the country can quickly buy their groceries up to £45* without visiting a till, using the M&S app on their smartphone.

The expansion is the latest step in M&S’s efforts to deliver new digital services that will help customers shop with confidence** this Christmas, and follows last week’s UK-wide rollout of appointment shopping service ‘Sparks Book & Shop’ – which has already facilitated over 81,000 shopping slots for customers.

How Mobile Pay Go works

Mobile Pay Go – which is housed within the M&S app, alongside Sparks – has continued to grow in popularity during the pandemic, attracting around 20,000 new regular users since March. To use the payment service, customers simply:

1.Scan their items as they shop

2.Pay using a pre-saved card or Apple pay (up to £45)

3.Go, without visiting a checkout

Contact-free shopping  

At the start of March, the service was being trialled in just 50 London stores. Given MPG’s extensive positive customer feedback, M&S accelerated its rollout to over 300 stores across the UK, and today is almost doubling that to reach full national rollout in 573 stores.

The rapid expansion of MPG is just one example of how M&S has moved quickly to respond to the growing demand for contact-free shopping during the pandemic – having also launched a brand-new contactless Click & Collect service, raised its contactless limit to £45, and offered contact-free home delivery on all M&S.com orders.

Helen Milford, M&S Stores Director said: “We want to help our customers shop with confidence – especially as we head towards Christmas – and that’s why we’ve accelerated the rollout of Mobile Pay Go to all our UK stores. With the current restrictions in place, making shopping as easy and efficient as possible is really important to us and to our customers. Mobile Pay Go helps do just that – it’s quick, contact-free and means fewer queues at our checkouts.”

A fully integrated digital experience

Implementing digital solutions like Mobile Pay Go are a key part of how M&S is transforming to put digital at the heart of its operations and create a better shopping experience for its customers. The M&S app, which has seen over 1.6 million downloads since the relaunch of Sparks in July, is central to this – housing Sparks, Book & Shop, MPG and more all in one place, ready for customers to use and shop with confidence. 

As Mobile Pay Go is directly linked to Sparks, any customer that utilises MPG for its quick speed and convenience will still get all the great benefits of shopping with Sparks. This means that M&S’s 8 million Sparks customers can continue to be rewarded and donate to their chosen charity every time they shop using the app in-store.

M&S is supporting today’s rollout with in-store décor and emails to its Sparks database of 8 million customers. To help customers that might be new to the service, M&S will be sharing its simple three-step instructional video on M&S.com and its social channels (including its vast network of store Facebook pages), outlining how easy it is to complete a transaction using Mobile Pay Go.

Across all of its stores, M&S has a series of social distancing measures in place to keep everyone safe and well. These include:

• Hand sanitiser available at the front door (and in other parts of the store).
• Extensive signage & floor markings throughout the store to remind everyone to give each other the space they need and to make it easier to find products.
• Perspex screens at tills with clear signage encouraging contactless payments (up to the increased limit of £45).
• Face coverings must be worn by customers shopping in-store unless they have a medical exemption. M&S sells a range of face coverings for any customers that don’t have one
• For social distancing purposes, all of our stores have a maximum capacity based on their size. To implement this, each store has a friendly host at the entrance who uses their handheld Honeywell device to count customers in and manage the queue, should there need to be one. Customers can avoid any risk of queuing by using Sparks Book & Shop to reserve a shopping slot at a time that suits them.