DoP Deep: How are tech companies using QR codes?
Practical product use cases for QR codes from Netflix, WhatsApp, Square, Shopify, Stripe and more
🔒DoP Deep goes deeper into the concepts and ideas that are covered in the Weekly Briefing to help you learn lessons from the experiences of top tech companies. If you’d like to upgrade to receive them you can do so below. Or you can find out more about what you get as a paid subscriber here.
Hi product people 👋,
The global QR code payments market is estimated to be worth around USD 9.98 billion and is projected to grow significantly over the next decade1. But QR codes aren’t just used for payments; the Covid pandemic saw businesses adopt QR codes for things like ordering food at restaurants or reading bar menus, too.
In this deep dive, we’ll explore how top tier tech companies including Netflix, Stripe, Shopify and others are using QR codes in their products. Some of the use cases will be for features you might expect like user authentication or device sharing and others will be a little less conventional.
If you’ve used QR codes in other products but weren’t quite sure which use cases might be suitable for your own business then this deep dive should hopefully help give you some inspiration.
Coming up:
How this analysis is structured
How top tier companies like Stripe, Netflix, WhatsApp, Square, Shopify and others are using QR codes for use cases like user authentication, interactive ads, payments and more.
Examples of ‘industry-first’ use cases you might not have considered before
Key trends and takeaways to give you inspiration for how your own product might use QR codes
The companies featured in full
How this analysis is structured
For this deep dive, we’re looking at how QR codes are used by top tier companies across some of the following dimensions:
Product category - each example of QR codes spans product categories including social, ecommerce, internet things / hardware, workplace productivity, finance and others.
Use case - for each company, the use cases are clearly explained to help you to understand how they’re used in context. This can be used to help you consider potential QR code use cases for your own product.
How it works - a description / explanation of how the QR code is used by the product in context.
UI samples - samples of how the QR code feature looks in context for each of the products featured in the deep dive. This can include screenshots of the product in-situ on mobile, web and other devices (like TVs for Netflix, for example).
As well as these high level dimensions, QR code use cases are then broken down further into use case categories to help us to glean some insights that we can use for further analysis, too. Based on the use cases found in the tech companies featured, the use case categories include:
Login and authentication - one of the more common use cases, this is where QR codes are used to help users, register, login or authenticate / prove who they are.
Value prop sharing and virality - this use case describes an instance where a product’s core value proposition is made sharable or viral through smart use of QR codes. For example, social network Bluesky has introduced a feature called “Starter packs” which allows users to curate a set of people and interests to follow which can be shared via a QR. The utility of the QR code is to share a product’s core value proposition by using QR codes effectively.
Security improvements - this can include things like using QR codes for increased parental controls (TikTok) or as an extra layer of protection using QR codes for 2FA. We’ll look at some examples of how companies are doing this.
Monetization - QR codes are used directly to take payments and drive monetization. The obvious product category for this includes fintech apps from companies like Stripe and Square but there are other examples we’ll explore together, too.