Snippet: Apple Pay Hurdles ☇

Tim Higgins and Elizabeth Dexheimer for Bloomberg:

While 66 percent of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners surveyed had signed up for Apple Pay, repeat usage is being hurt, the study by Phoenix Marketing International said. Almost half of users visited a store listed as an Apple Pay merchant only to find they couldn’t use the service because the location wasn’t actually accepting the system or wasn’t ready to do so, according to the survey, which drew about 3,000 respondents.

I’ve used Apple Pay a lot since it has been introduced. Almost all in-app versions work great (Target’s app hasn’t in the two times I tried), but in stores it has really depended on the state of the terminals. Subway has worked less often than it has worked (with one employee skeptical that I wasn’t “hacking” the credit card machine), McDonald’s has mostly worked, and the rest of places have worked every time. Meijer’s original terminals were a bit older and so some just failed, but all the locations near me received new ones recently.

If I were to point the biggest hurdles for Apple Pay for me, it would be that stores I shop don’t support it (or have the ability to use it explicitly disabled), they have old terminals that are flaky, or the employee training is lacking. As more people have Apple Pay-compatible iPhones, the Apple Watch, and NFC-capable Android devices, stores will need to iron out the kinks on their end, either through replacement hardware or better training.