“Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has called 2015 the ‘year of Apple Pay,'” Olga Kharif reports for Bloomberg. “So far it’s been underwhelming. The mobile-payments system, which marks its one-year anniversary this month, has failed to catch on with consumers, accounting for only 1 percent of all retail transactions in the U.S., according to researcher Aite Group. ‘People don’t know why it is they’d use Apple Pay,’ said Jared Schrieber, CEO of InfoScout, a shopper-research firm. ‘They are satisfied with the current methods and they don’t know how Apple Pay works.'”
“More than 75 percent of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users hadn’t tried the service as of April, according to a Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. In June, 13 percent of 1,500 people surveyedby InfoScout and Pymnts.com said they tried Apple Pay,” Kharif reports. “A more recent, smaller survey of 500 iPhone users published in July by Auriemma Consulting Group did find that 42 percent of the respondents used it for in-app and in-store purchases. ‘We’re off to a great start and we are seeing continued, double-digit monthly growth in Apple Pay transactions since launch,’ Apple said in an e-mailed statement. ‘It’s going to grow reasonably slowly for the next three to five years, and then we are going to see a ‘hockey stick,” a sudden surge, said Thad Peterson, an analyst at Boston, Massachusetts-based Aite,” Kharif reports. “”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The Counterfeit Card Liability Shift just went into effect on October 1st. Now the retailer that has made investment in EMV deployment is protected from financial liability for card-present counterfeit fraud losses. Let’s give it some time now to sink in with the hoi polloi. In addition, as more Apple Pay-compliant devices roll out, Apple Pay adoption will naturally increase.
And, by the way, 1 percent of all retail transactions in the U.S. and growing is certainly nothing to sneeze at.
That said, if Apple were interested in really promoting the use of Apple Pay, they could – gasp! – incentivize its use. As we wrote in August:
Apple, give us a reason to use Apple Pay beyond looking like tech dorks at the register. What’s the incentive to use Apple Pay? There is none besides looking like a flaming nerd. As if Apple doesn’t have any money. That, inexplicably, is how they approach Apple Pay.
Hello, Tim? Eddy? Talk to some people who actually go to stores and shop for things, please. Incentivize its use! Give Apple Pay users a percentage of every dollar spent via Apple Pay to spend at Apple Stores. Something. Anything Get people used to using it first. Sheesh. It’s really not that difficult. It really isn’t.
Apple Pay has paved the way for Android Pay. As usual, Apple did all the hard work. And thank’s to Apple Pay, people now think that Android Pay is just as safe, which it is not.