Roger Fingas
Although Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed that Apple Pay had "gotten off to the most amazing start," about two-thirds of its users are encountering problems at retail, according to a survey published this week by Phoenix Marketing International.
The survey of about 3,000 people, obtained by Bloomberg, noted that 66 percent of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners — the only ones who can use Apple Pay at retail, until the Apple Watch ships on April 24 — have signed up for the service so far. Almost half of that group, however, is said to have visited a store listed as an Apple Pay partner but discovered that the location wasn't accepting the platform, at least at the time.
Among the problem group, 48 percent said it took too long to process a transaction, and 42 percent said the cashier wasn't familiar with the technology. Some shoppers also complained about transactions being incorrect, or run twice.
A separate Citi Research survey published on Monday echoed these complaints, according to Bloomberg.
The lack of merchant support is thought to be linked to the cost of upgrading point-of-sale terminals to models that can support NFC chips like the one used in the iPhone. Although US retailers are obligated to upgrade those terminals by October anyway to support EMV chip technology (for credit and debit cards), only a third of them had switched by the end of 2014, and a projection quoted by Bloomberg only calls for half of them to convert by the end of this year.
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
Oliver Haslam
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
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123 Comments
I guess this the downside with launching your new payment service in a country still stuck in the banking dark age. I'm sure there would have been fewer problems if the rollout had started in Japan or somewhere Europe.
I've had similar issues with it. Over the weekend, I had to try three times and it said "Done" each time, but didn't actually go through. I finally had to give up and use a regular credit card. I've used it about twenty times and have found that it generally takes longer for me to complete the process than it would to just take out and use my credit card. I see the benefit with regards to security, but in the end, the credit card companies are on the hook for any fraudulent charges and the banks are seeing higher fraudulent charges anyway because of their implementations of Apple Pay. In the end, it seems like just another way to pay that also has its problems.
If cashier is not familiar or educated than that is not Apple Pay's problem but training issue. Sometime if you have to run Apple pay twice than that no different than I have to swipe my card twice in card reader. In very short time, such minor issues will get resolve and Apple Pay will be de-facto standard. Long term story still stay intact for incremental Apple Pay usage.
I've never had a problem unless the NFC reader was broken.
I use it all the time at Wholefood, Duane Reade, and surprisingly this little Indian spice store that has a NFC reader.
This is overblown. I use it a LOT...and yes, there are problems... but I would say it's about 1/20 of the times I use it there is an issue. I still would have answered the questions with an "affirmative" that there are problems: but saying that everyone is having problems doesn't really represent how frequent or pervasive those problems are. So far, my favorite place to use it is at the Shaw's Star Market Grocery store. When you use Apple Pay there it literally doesn't ask you ANY questions (cash, member number, PIN, etc). You don't even have to touch the machine at all. Walgreens is the worst at this. Even with Apple Pay, checking out is a PITA with all the stupid prompts on the machine... Also: let's not forget that things are not always peachy with plastic cards either. Why does it always feel like the person in FRONT of me has trouble swiping their damn card?! ;-)