Half of Apple Pay users have used it just once: report

Apple Pay launched in the fall of last year, and adoption of the mobile payment tool has been impressive. But an estimated 48 percent of Apple Pay's 12 million users have only used it one time, according to a study from Phoenix Marketing International. 

|
Eric Risberg/AP/File
Eddy Cue, Apple Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, demonstrates the Apple Pay mobile payment system at a Whole Foods store in Cupertino, Calif.

Adoption of Apple Pay, the tech giant’s mobile payment tool, has been impressive. But a new report says nearly half of the people who have tried it out have used it only once.

Similarly, nearly half of users said they’ve gone into a store that supposedly accepted Apple Pay, only to find out it really didn’t, according to the report.

That’s according to research from Phoenix Marketing International, which polled 3,002 credit card users as part of an ongoing study.

Apple Pay launched on October 20. Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month that Apple Pay, which started with six partner banks, had expanded to more than 2,500 participating institutions. Nearly 700,000 locations were accepting the system as of the March 7 event where Apple Watch was launched, Cook said.

The Phoenix report had even more positive numbers for the system. Eleven percent of all credit-card holding households and 66% of iPhone 6 owners had activated Apple Pay.

The research estimated that, four months in, the Apple Pay user base was about 12 million people — impressive for card-free, mobile-payment technology that has caught on in parts of Asia and elsewhere but has struggled for a foothold in the United States.

“However, the early-on transaction potential is being undercut by low repeat usage and lost payment opportunities,” said Greg Weed, director of Card Research at Phoenix, in a news release.

According to the report, 48% of people who have used Apple Pay have  used it only once.

There may also be some frustration among those who tried and failed. Fifty-nine percent of Apple Pay adopters said they had gone into a store attempting to make a purchase. But 47% of them said a store that was listed as an Apple Pay merchant either didn’t really accept the system or wasn’t yet ready to do so.

Weed said Apple needs to do more to help users avoid that kind of experience.

“Since Apple Pay is still in an introductory mode and the NFC (near field communication) acceptance network still has a long way to go, adding a continuously updated ‘local store directory’ to the Passbook app is a necessary, short-term product improvement,” he said.

Passbook is an app for Apple’s iOS mobile operating system that stores debit-card and other information and works with various payment methods, including Apple Pay.

The Phoenix report is the first installment in what’s planned to be surveys of 16,000 people in 2015, monitoring Apple Pay and other new or revamped “mobile wallet” systems scheduled to enter the market.

Google is reported to be working on a new payment system at least tentatively calledAndroid Pay.

The system, which could debut at Google’s developers’ conference in May, would, like Apple Pay, allow retailers to add a button to their mobile apps or technology at their physical cash registers to accept it.

Google beat Apple to the mobile-payments punch with Google Wallet in 2011. But Wallet has failed to catch on with retailers and consumers as quickly and widely as Apple Pay has.

Doug Gross is a staff writer covering personal finance for NerdWallet. Follow him on Twitter @doug_gross and on Google+.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Half of Apple Pay users have used it just once: report
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Saving-Money/2015/0402/Half-of-Apple-Pay-users-have-used-it-just-once-report
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe