The launch of Apple Pay was supposed to herald a new age of mobile payments.
While it remains to be seen if that will happen, the service is off to a rocky start. Some glitches and problems have been reported, and there’s the troubling issue of a lack of support from some large retailers.
Several ApplePay users are reporting that they were charged twice for their transactions. CNN’s Samuel Burke reported that he had been charged twice for his food order. A Reddit user going by the name Kelby May reported the same thing. When Burke attempted to rectify the issue he was given the runaround. Bank of America passed him on to Apple, who said they could do nothing since they keep no records of the transactions.
Apple blames the cashiers and their POS terminals for the mistakes. They also claim that very few customers have been affected. Bank of America, for its part, is now promising to reimburse customers for any duplicate transactions.
More pressingly, certain retailers are blocking it from working on their compatible systems, while small businesses aren’t even equipped to handle NFC transactions.
RiteAid and CVS Health are blocking Apple Pay transactions on their NFC terminals. While they were not part of the Apple Pay roll out, their terminals have had the capability to take NFC payments. RiteAid and CVS have also blocked Google Wallet, which was also working on their terminals.
The move comes as RiteAid and CVS Health attempt to encourage use of their own CurrentC payments system. CurrrentC is a product of MCX, a creation of a consortium of retailers including Walmart and Target. It uses QR codes instead of NFC to link a user’s phone to their bank account.
On the small business front, Newtek Business Services reports that in their SBA Market Sentiment Survey of one thousand small businesses, only four percent were equipped with NFC enabled point-of-sale systems. Come October 2015, most retailers will be required to be EMV compliant, meaning a majority of SMBs will need to upgrade their POS.
However, Newtek’s survey also showed that only seven percent of respondents planned to upgrade to NFC enabled point-of-sale systems in the future.