“Apple Inc.’s payments service, now three months old, is making progress toward a goal that has eluded other mobile wallets: persuading people to use it,” Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for The Wall Street Journal. “Previous efforts by Google Inc., eBay Inc. and a host of startups to prod shoppers to pay for purchases with a mobile phone have languished, because consumers didn’t see an advantage over swiping a credit or debit card.”
“Early signs suggest that Apple Pay is different,” Wakabayashi reports. “‘Our customers are saying it’s safer,’ said Brittany Salcedo, night manager at Canyon Market in Springdale, Utah, near Zion National Park. The supermarket installed the wireless readers that work with Apple Pay three weeks ago. Though Ms. Salcedo hasn’t kept a formal tally, she estimates that 30% of the store’s shoppers are using the service.”
“The machines also accept Softcard, a competing mobile-payments service owned by a group of U.S. wireless carriers, but Ms. Salcedo estimates that five times as many customers use Apple Pay as Softcard,” Wakabayashi reports. “Harbortouch Payments LLC, an Allentown, Pa., supplier of point-of-sale systems, said it has witnessed a similar surge in interest among its clients. Harbortouch has offered free wireless readers to them since 2012. As of August 2013 , 22% of its merchants had installed readers. In the month after Apple Pay was announced, 68% of orders asked for the readers. ‘It’s like night and day,’ said Brendan Lauber, Harbortouch’s chief technology officer. ‘Now, merchants are actively coming to us and asking how to support this.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]