The Year of Apple Pay Proves a Slow One

October 6, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

It’s almost hard to believe that Apple Pay has been around for nearly a year now, and it’s represented a staggering change in the way we live, work and do business.

But this change hasn’t been so readily embraced, and it’s starting to look like the Year of Apple Pay—as Apple CEO Tim Cook once called it—is turning out to be the Year of Tepid and Limited Success.

To give Apple Pay its due credit, it’s made a lot of progress in a comparatively limited time. It’s actually used in one full percent of retail transactions in the United States, as reported by the Aite Group, which isn’t bad for a service that’s been around just under a year, is only available on certain devices, and can only be used at certain stores.

Yet these constraints, some note, are what’s really holding Apple Pay back from much wider success than it could enjoy. A further report from InfoScout suggests that potential users are unsure of just why it is they’d turn to Apple Pay in the first place, so even learning about it is rather pointless in the end.

This is a development that’s proving less than satisfactory for the businesses bringing it in. Panera Bread brought Apple Pay in fairly quickly, but even after almost a year, Apple Pay accounts for “low single digits) percentages in terms of total transactions. Panera Bread’s iOS app sees much better traffic, but even entirely in the Apple walled garden, it’s still just about 20 percent. Firehouse Subs, meanwhile, notes it accounts for about two percent of all transactions.

However, one thing is clear: the more competition comes into the market, the better Apple Pay is likely to do. Some have complained about a lack of knowledge of the product and how it works, as well as its comparative lack of utility against that greatest of mobile payment mechanisms: cash. But with more competitors coming in, customers will find out more about the convenience factor this represents.

It’s also a great opportunity for Apple to take a page from some other books, and start offering some specific discounts and the like to use Apple Pay. Almost a Groupon-style setup or the like; convenience is a great customer draw, but an even better such draw is the idea of getting cheaper whatever just for using a specific mobile payments app.

While Apple Pay—and most any mobile payments system—has convenience on a lock, mobile payments can’t really take off until we get past the “gee-whiz” nature of it all and start focusing on the benefits such a system offers. We need people to see just how valuable this can really be, how it can be much more valuable than cash.

We’re starting to get there, with discounts and skip-the-checkout options and the like, but we won’t really be there until everyone knows just how valuable a service this really is.