According to a survey from market research group Phoenix Marketing International, 38 percent of all Apple Pay transaction volume comes from in-app purchases, with only 62 percent of purchases made in-store. The survey doesn’t offer a reason as to why in-app purchases seem to be so robustly represented, but in a press release from Phoenix, Greg Weed, director of card research at the company, suggested that "the number of acceptance locations [for Apple Pay] is relatively small (but growing) and the incidence of reported friction at the point-of-sale is high.”
That is, in-app purchases may look like a large part of Apple Pay's transaction volume because in-store purchases are still working to get off the ground.
Phoenix has been surveying Apple Pay users for over a year now. In April the group reported that “47 percent of all Apple Pay users shopping in a participating store were not able to use Apple Pay to complete a transaction at least once,” either because the terminal didn’t work, the cashier couldn’t help the customer, or for some other reason.
That may not tell the whole story, however, as Apple has increased the number of retailers that accept NFC payments seven-fold since the launch of the payment platform last October. When Apple Pay launched, 220,000 merchants accepted the service, and by the end of 2015 the company estimated it had brought 1.5 million merchants into the fold. That means if customers weren’t able to make a payment in a brick-and-mortar store using Apple Pay in December 2014, their odds of making a successful payment at a participating retailer in December 2015, after this survey took place, were much greater.
Weed also noted in the Phoenix press release that "Regional differences [in Apple Pay usage] are evident during this early stage—with only of handful of states accounting for half of all Apple Pay credit card transactions as reported by survey respondents.” That data was not included in Phoneix’s survey summary that the company provided to Ars.
Still, in-app purchases are important toward getting a payment platform off the ground—one of the big value propositions of signing up for a payment platform like Apple Pay or Android Pay or Samsung Pay is that you can buy things on a phone with the click of a button, without needing to input your credit card details several times across several apps. According to Phoenix’s survey, 43 percent of Apple Pay users had made a purchase through Apple’s apps, 36 percent made a purchase using Apple Pay through Target’s app, and 29 percent of Apple Pay users made a purchase through Nike’s app.
Phoenix’s survey was conducted speaking to 568 Apple Pay users who had linked a credit card to their Apple Pay accounts. Apple Pay users who linked debit and pre-paid cards were not included in the survey.
The survey also found that Apple Pay isn’t frequently used in-store among any retailers yet. McDonald’s had the highest percentage of users—38 percent—who purchased something from their stores with Apple Pay at least once a month, during a five-month period. Walgreens came in at 34 percent, Subway at 33 percent, and Whole Foods at 30 percent. 27 percent of Apple Pay users bought something at least once a month from the Apple Store.
Leon Majors, senior vice president of payments system practice at Phoenix, noted in the company’s press release that getting users to keep using Apple Pay in retailers’ stores is still a challenge. “For any given retailer, a minority of their Apple Pay credit card users reported making at least one purchase a month during the 5-month period.”
One way to solve that frequency problem could be by incorporating loyalty cards, which offer discounts to frequent customers to encourage them to return often. Apple Pay did that just six months ago.
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