“Apple Inc. said its mobile-payment service is now available in more than 2 million retail locations, with merchants such as Crate & Barrel, Chick-fil-A and Au Bon Pain rolling it out in stores,” Olga Kharif reports for Bloomberg.
“Online retailer Zappos.com added Apple Pay on its iPhone and iPad apps Tuesday as competition intensifies among mobile payment providers. Globally, mobile payments will increase to $620 billion in 2016 from $450 billion last year, according to a report from TrendForce,” Kharif reports. “‘We’ve been getting requests from customers to use Apple Pay for quite a while,’ said Aki Iida, head of mobile for Zappos. ‘It makes the customer experience easier, why not try it?'”
“In addition to pushing past its goal to make Apple Pay available in 1.5 million retail locations by the end of 2015, the company said the feature’s in-app purchase volume more than doubled in the last six months of the year compared with the first half,” Kharif reports. “In October, 16.6 percent of people who own newer iPhones had tried Apple Pay, an increase from 9 percent in November 2014, according to a survey by Pymnts and InfoScout, a consumer researcher. The service has been expanding globally.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The more places Apple Pay spreads, the better. More, please!
SEE ALSO:
Apple Pay coming to ATMs from Bank Of America and Wells Fargo – January 28, 2016
Apple Pay picks up 58 new US card issuers, approaches 1,000 total banks and credit unions – January 5, 2016
Pay Finders app for finding Apple Pay locations reports 750% increase in users in two days – December 28, 2015
Why Apple’s revolutionary Apple Pay is going to be absolutely enormous – December 18, 2015
Apple Pay to take on Tencent’s WeChat Wallet and Alipay in China – December 18, 2015
Apple partners with UnionPay to launch Apple Pay in China – December 17, 2015
Are you listening FIA Card Services? Store branded CitiBank card folks?
Incentives, incentives, incentives!
It was Discover Card that got me to upgrade my 5S (to 6S). They had 10% cashback for Apple-pay in-store transactions through the end of last year. With the volume of my ApplePay purchases for those three months, that cashback alone has paid for the difference between the $350 I got for my 5s on CraigsList, and $700 ($650 + tax) for the new 6s. I couldn’t convince my brother to go through the process; while he did have a Discover card, it wasn’t the right one, so it wouldn’t work with ApplePay, and he simply couldn’t be bothered to call them and ask for a change.
I don’t know what are the current numbers for ApplePay adoption, but I would be surprised if more than 5% of 6 / 6s owners have bothered yet (16 months later). They don’t realise the security and convenience of the system, and simply don’t want to be bothered. The only way to get them to scan a credit card into the Wallet app and confirm it is to strongly motivate them with some incentives.
I love Apple Pay to buy things that that I will not be returning to the store such as groceries, restaurants etc. But I am reluctant to use it for hard goods that I might return because if I lose the receipt, the retailer cannot look up the sale via my credit card. As a result, I may only get store credit instead of a full refund.
For instance, if I buy a bunch of stuff from Home Depot for a project, I usually end up with items I did not use. If I lose the receipt, HD can just use my credit card to look up the transaction and reimburse me for the return. With Apple Pay, the transaction cannot be looked up, so if you lose your receipt you are stuck with store credit if anything.
Do you need the full 16-digit number to look up the receipt? Because the last four digits of your Apple Pay number are documented in your phone if you forget.
——RM
It’s amusing how the critics are always complaining how Apple Pay is slow to catch on considering iOS has a relatively small mobile market share and hasn’t been around for that long. They’re not giving Apple a lot of credit for changing the way things are being paid for. It should take a lot of time for people to feel comfortable about how they pay for products and services. If Apple can prove to consumers Apple Pay is safe it should lock in consumers to Apple iPhones and tablets and give Apple a large customer base.
The critics never directly attacked Google Wallet which had been around much longer and Android has huge mobile market share. Google Wallet had a huge head-start over Apple Pay and didn’t achieve very much at all.
Of the 2,000,000 locations, only six people know they accept ApplePay or know how to use it. The learning is more than a curve.
BOOOOOOO! Chick-Fil-A is a homophobic hard right wing business that seems to be counter culture to Apple M.O.?
They are totally homophobic, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want them adopting Apple Pay!
So true, they should definitely not even do business in the Middle East either, that’s like a permanent hard-on right wing culture.
As I like to point out, retailers don’t have to “roll out” Apple Pay. All they have to do is turn on NFC on their card terminals. Because of this, it’s more than possible for a retailer to be accepting Apple Pay without knowing it.
Case in point: Bob Evans restaurants. Their new credit card terminals say nothing about Apple Pay. They don’t even display the “contactless payment” logo. But if you hold your iPhone up to the terminal when it says “swipe card”, it will go into Apple Pay mode, and the payment will be accepted.
Since discovering that, I’ve made it a point to attempt Apple Pay at least once at each new retailer I visit. I have found others where it works, even though there’s nothing to indicate that.
——RM
I tried Apple Pay but it’s clumsy and unreliable so I’ve gone back to using my cards. I have a store card anyway which doesn’t work with iPhone, but I found Apple Pay on my iPhone 6 very fiddly. Sometimes it works and my card is displayed, but at least half the time it just opens the phone and then I have to close it and try again.
I am more likely to be out if the house without my phone, than without my wallet anyway…