Apple Pay In Troubled Waters?

Competition in the mobile wallet space has heated up with tech giants making a foray into this service. Customers have a number of options to choose from, including Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Pay Pal and Android Pay.

Apple’s digital wallet and mobile payment system, Apple Pay, seems to be struggling to boost its usage rate. According to a latest report from InfoScout, most customers still prefer credit or debit card for making online payments rather than opting for digital wallet services.

Apple Pay usage was at its lowest rate, being used for only 2.7% of Apple Pay-eligible transactions over the Black Friday Weekend. “This is a fairly marked decrease from what we saw last year on Black Friday, when iPhone 6 owners used Apple Pay for 4.9% of eligible transactions at participating merchants”, InfoScout noted.

The study was based on 300,000 pictures of receipts that American customers submitted through apps on their smartphones. It found that 79% of iPhone users and 74% of Android users paid with their credit and debit cards on 2015’s “iconic shopping day”.

“This was our first time investigating mobile wallet usage among Android owners and we were interested to see that of all the mobile wallet options available, it was actually PayPal that came out on top on Black Friday. Since Android Pay and Samsung Pay were both released within the last three months, we may see this picture change as time goes on”, the report added.

The Motley Fool cited another study conducted by Trustev in which 1,000 consumers were surveyed who owned Apple Pay-compatible iPhones about their Apple Pay habits. It found that nearly 80% had not used Apple Pay even once, while of the 20% who had, most (56%) only used it about once a week.

However, in a separate report based on proximity mobile payments projections for the next few years, Chris Neiger of The Motley Fool pointed out that the retail and mobile industries are still at the nascent stages of mobile payments, so declaring Apple Pay a failure right away is a “tad premature”.