It heavily depends on where you use it. Here in UK any card payments are often limited to minimum of £5 in small shops that have heavy transaction fees burden and low margins. Big networks with more resources often let you pay as little as you want by card, and they more often have NFC enabled POS devices.
So it's not an NFC or POS limit, but a business decision for these small merchants. Bitcoin can address this issue for sure, but this doesn't concern NFC.
​​


2014-03-10 16:14 GMT+00:00 Jean-Paul Kogelman <jeanpaulkogelman@me.com>:

Just to add some more numbers, in Canada, the maximum is $50 and I've used it for transactions of $5, even less.

I use it every day to pay for breakfast and it works through my wallet, even with multiple NFC enabled cards in there (though not overlapping). The experience is quite smooth; simply tap my wallet on the POS and a few seconds later it's approved.

jp

On Mar 10, 2014, at 9:04 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:

I just did my first contactless nfc payment with a MasterCard. It worked very well and was quite delightful - definitely want to be doing more of these in future.

A bit more competitive intelligence - turns out that the experience isn't quite so good after all. After trying a few more times to use contactless payments, I found it has a ~75% failure rate based on my usage.

By far the biggest problem is also the most predictable - it's very common here for merchants to require minimum payment sizes before they'll accept credit cards, often quite high, like 20 CHF or more. But the PIN-less mode only works for payments below a certain threshold, I haven't quite figured out what it is yet, but in the UK it's 20 GBP so maybe it's about 30 CHF. So there turns out to be an incredibly thin price range in which the simple touch-to-pay system actually works. Most of the time, either they:

a) Reject cards entirely because the payment is too small
b) Don't have the right hardware, or the hardware just mysteriously fails to work.
c) Require a PIN because the payment is too large

I'm sure Bitcoin can do better than this.

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