Seven years ago, Apple unveiled Apple Pay on September 9, 2014. Now , a new surveys suggests that 6% of iPhone users in America use Apple Pay for in-store payments.
Seven years post-launch, new PYMNTS data shows that 93.9% of consumers with Apple Pay activated on their iPhones do not use it in-store to pay for purchases.
That means only 6.1% do.
That finding is based on PYMNTS’ national study of 3,671 U.S. consumers conducted between Aug. 3-10, 2021.
After seven years, Apple Pay’s adoption and usage isn’t much larger than it was 2015 (5.1%), a year after its launch, and is the same as it was in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic…
For consumers to use Apple Pay in the store, a merchant needed to accept contactless payment. That was 19% of U.S. merchants in 2015; it’s estimated to be 70% of merchants in 2021.
Consumers also had to have a particular model of iPhone to activate Apple Pay – the iPhone 6 or 6S. That was 39% of consumers with iPhones in 2015; today, that’s 96% of iPhone users. To provision a card in their Apple Pay wallet, the consumer’s bank needed to have an agreement in place with Apple Pay.
Those 2015 headwinds have largely been neutralized.
The one that remains seven years later is convincing more than just the early mobile payment adopters and Apple enthusiasts that Apple Pay solves a problem at the point of sale that using their plastic card does not…
That said, Apple Pay usage in store, to its credit, has remained steady, though small, while the other mobile wallets have shriveled. Most of the decline of the mobile wallet use in 2021 is related to the decline in use of the other “Pays” in store.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s not all bad news: Apple Pay today is the biggest in-store mobile wallet service, with 45.5% share of mobile wallet users. Over the last seven years, PYMNTS says that the total amount of Apple Pay transactions at U.S. retail stores has increased from an estimated $5 billion in 2015 to $90 billion in 2021.
This is a marathon, not a sprint.