JCPenney Stores Dump Apple Pay Mobile Payments From the Register
It’s no secret that JCPenney hasn’t been doing really well in the retail front of late. With online shopping pressing it from one side and an increasingly skittish consumer pressing it from the other, JCPenney’s need to please its current base and bring in new customers has never been clearer. To that end, JCPenney recently dropped Apple Pay support from both its physical store registers and its app, a move that has left customers scratching their heads and turning to social media for answers.
The loss of Apple Pay emerged over the holiday weekend, which prompted no small outrage from Twitter. One respondent echoed the tone of JCPenney’s own post, noting that he had “…made the decision to drop JCPenney from my shopping options. I apologize for any inconvenience.” Others wondered why JCPenney would drop a secure shopping option, one both tested and proven, from its roster of options.
Worse, as one Twitter response pointed out, many of JCPenney’s competitors are more than happy to accept Apple Pay as an option, including large-scale anchor stores in malls that are, in many cases, mere hundreds of feet away.
Potential reasons for JCPenney endangering its own customer pool in such a fashion are slim in number. One of the biggest is that Apple Pay has never shared customer data with stores, and JCPenney may want access to that data for itself. With the growing push toward big data analytics—the process of analyzing data looking for “actionable insights”, or key patterns that drive business decisions—stores need access to lots of data. Mobile payments platforms can provide that access. The biggest problem with this theory, however, is that there are other ways to get that data. Sensors in stores, for example, can readily track movement paths and the like. However, setting up a sensor array in stores costs money, and the mobile payments data is more immediately available.
If JCPenney is really willing to throw over a popular, customer-friendly platform just to get access to data, it may find that data was a lot more expensive—in terms of lost sales—than it ever expected. JCPenney may well have cut open the goose that laid the golden egg on this one, looking for the source of the gold and discovering it was lost with the goose.