Retailers Remain Unconvinced of Mobile Payments’ Market Power

Way back in January, while Apple Pay was still a juggernaut in the making, Apple’s Tim Cook made a strong statement: 2015 would be the year of Apple Pay.

And while many merchants are starting to agree with Cook—sufficiently so that there are even schisms opening up in the ranks for the Merchant Customer Exchange—there is a surprisingly substantial number of retailers out there that aren’t convinced that mobile payments, even Apple Pay, can bring the kind of value others think it might.

With Apple reps projecting that the year of Apple Pay would conclude with around half of the top 100 merchants in the United States accepting Apple Pay in stores, and the year around halfway over, it’s worth looking to see how far Apple has gone in pursuit of that goal.

So far, less than a quarter of that number has been achieved, and almost two thirds of responding retailers in a recent study from Reuters said, specifically, that they will not accept Apple Pay in locations this year.

Four companies planned to by the end of the year. Admittedly, two out of the top 100 retailers on the National Retail Federation’s list didn’t respond to questions, and another two only sold online, but that’s still a fairly hefty number that won’t be taking Apple Pay, and that’s going to keep Apple from achieving its 50 percent goal, if the numbers remain unchanged through the rest of 2015.

So why are some retailers so markedly uninterested in making the year of Apple Pay come to pass? Perhaps the biggest one was “insufficient customer demand.”

The customers actually weren’t interested but it went on from there. Retailers were unhappy about lack of access to customer data generated by Apple Pay transactions—data that can be used in normal store operations in terms of hours open, material stocked, and a variety of other points—and there were also several retailers holding out for access to the MCX offering, still set to arrive later this year.

Interestingly, issues of “security” weren’t exactly raised during this study, and it’s also noteworthy that one of the biggest problems was “insufficient customer demand,” as though retailers would change their minds if customers started asking for Apple Pay access in large numbers.

The MCX issue is also prevalent, but we’ve already seen some retailers break the circle for Apple Pay—including Best Buy—so it’s not out of line that Apple Pay couldn’t change a few minds, especially with the results of this survey in hand.

With some of the issues now clear, it might be a simple matter to fix some of the perceived “problems” and in doing so gain more members of Apple Pay’s rapidly growing user base.