Samsung Pay Adds Gift Cards to the Mobile Payment Mix Michael Kwan December 10, 2015 News Good news! If you’re tired of only using your credit card through Samsung Pay on your Samsung smartphone, you’re in luck! As the company had previously indicated, Samsung has now announced that Samsung Pay has been updated to support gift cards. This includes not only adding gift cards to your Rolodex of virtual plastic, but also the ability to buy gift cards from directly within the Samsung Pay app. Starting today, you can tap your way through the Samsung Pay mobile payment app on your phone to find that you can buy gift cards from 50 popular merchants. There’s a pretty good variety in there, similar to what you might find when you’re trying to pick up a last minute gift at the grocery store checkout. These include Toys R Us, Whole Foods, Panda Express, GameStop, Banana Republic and even eBay. What’s nice is that, just like their physical counterparts, the merchant gift cards you buy within Samsung Pay can be sent as a gift to a friend. It can feel a little weird buying a gift card for yourself, unless it’s to take advantage of some sort of deal or you really want to put limits on your spending habits, but you can do that too. Then, when you hit up the corresponding retailer, you can bring up the virtual gift card in Samsung Pay to complete your purchase. Sadly, these gift cards don’t use the magnetic secure transmission (MST) tech that Samsung Pay uses for credit cards; it just displays a barcode or other gift card info for the merchant. If the cashier doesn’t know how to do that and only knows how to swipe a physical gift card, you could be in just as much trouble as if you brought up the gift card in some other card-managing app. Via The Verge Share This With The World!
