Apple Pay Losses Its Charm

Posted by Kirhat | Tuesday, December 15, 2015 | | 0 comments »

Apple Pay Losses Its Charm
When it was launched, Apple Pay debuted with a lot of fanfare. After a year, not many were excited about the technology, which lets shoppers at retail store checkout counters pay for goods with their iPhones.

The latest data from the shopping research firm InfoScout suggests that use of Apple Pay may actually be decreasing, adding to concerns that Apple Pay could end up being a flop.

With 300,000 Americans submitting pictures of receipts through apps on their smartphones, InfoScout can identify exactly what type of devices they’re using, down to the model numbers. This allows them to study transactions made by people who actually have the capability to use mobile payment technologies such as NFC exclusively at stores with compatible point-of-sale (POS) terminals.

For Apple Pay, this qualifies owners of the iPhone 6 and above. On the Android side, the device market is far more fragmented, so its limit the study to owners of fairly equivalent devices like recent versions of Google’s Nexus phones, the LG G3 and G4, and the Samsung Galaxy S5 & S6.

The results are far more damning for Apple though. For instance, over the Black Friday weekend, only 2.7 percent of the people who were in a situation to buy with Apple Pay actually used the service, which is a drop from the previous year's usage rate of 4.6 percent.

According to the report, that's nearly a 41 percent decrease from last year's Black Friday, a disappointing figure given the fact that Apple has been aggressively expanding Apple Pay's availability over the past year.

The report also noted that the drop could be due to a larger base pool of people using the iPhone 6 compared to last year, when the research was done shortly after the phone launched.

"This is perplexing, considering Apple Pay has been widely available for over a year," BI Intelligence said in its own report about the InfoScout study.

InfoScout noted that consumers are still relying on regular credit and debit cards, with 79 percent of iPhone users and 74 percent of Android users opting to pay with plastic instead.

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