Samsung Pay Makes Loyalty Card Connection in the United States
Samsung Pay is gaining ground quickly as a mobile payments alternative with the best of them, but it’s been a bit slack in terms of loyalty programs.
That’s a development about to change thanks to some new options with Samsung Pay, allowing users to add both loyalty cards and merchant memberships directly to a Samsung Pay account via a Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
Since the average American household carries about 30 loyalty cards, being able to compress this mass into a block accessible via smartphone makes no small amount of sense.
Originally, this feature was only available in South Korea, reports note, but now it’s migrated to the United States, a market that could clearly use some consolidation capability for its rewards cards.
Reports suggest that the hope is that the newfound connection to loyalty cards will make one more reason for users to get behind Samsung Pay, especially given how much competition there currently is for customers in this still very young market.
It’s a good idea, but it has one problem, essentially the same problem that pretty much every other mobile device-specific platform has had for some time:
Samsung Pay’s market is essentially limited to those who have the correct Samsung device that will allow Samsung Pay to be used to begin with.
Samsung can’t poach users from Apple or LG or elsewhere unless those users jump ship altogether and go with Samsung Pay and Samsung devices.
It’s hard to imagine any feature set, or combination of features, that will cause a user to look at his or her current device, give it up as a bad idea, and buy a completely new breed of device just for the mobile payment platform.
This is a great idea, and it will probably go a good way toward fending off non-device-specific platforms like Google Pay or the various bank-based offerings, but even here, the most it can do is keep Samsung users in Samsung’s camp.
Still, it’s a good move, and it does prevent Samsung users from jumping ship. That may not have been such a big problem to begin with, but it does remove the possibility just the same.