Gas Up With Apple Pay at Chevron This Year

With the year in mobile payments—not to mention everything else—coming to an end, it’s small surprise that folks are beginning to look to the future.

While much of it is still somewhat hazy, there’s one important point to emerge, and its impact on the future will be substantial. Specifically, it comes from Chevron, who has plans to bring the Apple Pay mobile payment system to its operations with the opening days of 2015, and right at the biggest part of Chevron: the pumps.

Chevron is actually already a partner with Apple Pay, but only on purchases made in the Chevron stores themselves. Moving to the pumps was actually the next important step, and it’s one that Chevron’s eager to accomplish.

Word from Chevron proper is that it means to have the payment option in place by early 2015, though exact timelines have not yet been established, meaning that early 2015 is less a plan than it is a goal. Meanwhile, the current partnership for in-store sales is also set to expand, reaching 3,000 stores by the end of it all.

With Apple Pay gaining ground at a staggering rate, accounting for a reported one percent of all digital payment dollars in the month of November, it can never truly be a surprise to see anyone add Apple Pay to its systems.

But each new gain is a jolt, and proof that Apple Pay is being taken with an earnestness that few other mobile payment systems would be taken at so early in its tenure. That massive install base Apple enjoys can scarcely be hurting its chances, and that means a lot of places interested in bringing the service on.

But what really makes this a huge proposition is that gasoline is a largely fungible commodity for consumers—the Shell station is about as good as the Mobil, and the Mobil about as good as the Clark and so on—and as such, competitive edges will be hard to come by.

Apple Pay might well make some reconsider a planned purchase at the Shell, Mobil, or Clark and instead pull into the Chevron pumps. Having the ability to pay for gas with the Apple Pay system could be just the draw that some needed, and in turn, extra sales and profit for Chevron.

But the problem with that—at least for the gas stations—is that this is not a competitive edge that can be readily preserved. If other stations get involved—and they all but certainly will; none of them can afford to be without this technology for long—then the whole thing becomes just as fungible as it was before.

Chevron may be one of the first filling stations to get Apple Pay at the pumps, and if it does, it’s not likely to be alone in the market for long. This could be the start of Apple Pay’s ultimate ubiquity, and the means by which more and more of us turn to it to make payments on everything from fuel for our cars to fuel for our bellies.