Intelligent Shopping Cart

The thought of waiting in the long queue at a retail mall makes us all cringe. Many a times it takes more time for billing than for shopping for the family! With malls becoming the favorite weekend retreat for more and more people, the problem is only going to get worse.

Here's a thought...

Two things happen at the billing counter -
1. Computing the total bill
2. Payment

People come with basket or at times baskets full of goods. Obviously it takes a while to scan all of them and compute the bill. How about modeling a shopping cart on the lines of an online shopping cart? Make it intelligent so that it can compute the bill as the goods are added to or removed from it! All that is left to be done at the counter is the payment, which takes relatively lesser time.

It's feasibility and design would require some serious pondering but hey! it's a thought! :)

-Ashish.

CVV misuse

Credit card frauds are rampant these days. Here's a thought on the card verification value or CVV that appears on the credit cards...

Consider the following case:
You go to a petrol bunk and fill petrol in your car. You hand over your credit card. The card is swiped, you sign and zoom off. One month later you see a huge charge against your card and a list of all those transactions that you never made!
The bunk owner was a nasty chap. He made a note of your credit card details. All that he needed to execute an online transaction is the credit card number, expiry date and the CVV or the CVV2 if I should be more precise.

Question: Why should the CVV be printed on the card?

Thought: I see no reason for the CVV to be printed on the card. The banks should be more discreet in distributing the CVV. They do that with the ATM card PINs... why can't the same be done with the CVV? This way we can avoid the card being misused by the corrupt merchants like the one in the case cited above.