Retailers and eCommerce businesses around the world face all kinds of challenges in their quest to win customers and earn their loyalty. One of the best ways to do that, though, is to make sure to provide a customer experience that revolves around simplicity, ease-of-use, and convenience. As simple as that sounds, however, differing consumer tastes make it difficult to identify features that a broad cross-section of consumers will appreciate.
One such feature is the inclusion of mobile payment options in both online and offline checkout processes. With the near-universality of smartphone adoption, they’re the closest retailers will get to a sure thing, feature-wise. Of course, when it comes to mobile payment solutions, there’s Apple Pay and then there’s everyone else. Since Apple enjoys a 40% market share of the smartphone market, retailers adopting Apple Pay will find that their customers will use—and love—the addition. To illustrate the point, here are five reasons you should be all in on Apple Pay.
It’s Simpler for Customers
Retailers spend plenty of time trying to make the purchasing process as fast and friction-free as possible since that’s an excellent way to increase sales. When it comes time to pay, though, there’s always some kind of hangup. With Apple Pay, users don’t have to enter a single bit of information into an online shopping cart, because it’s already stored in their account. In person, it’s much the same—just tap your Apple device on the NFC receiver, wait for the check mark to appear, and poof —you’re done!
It Offers Enhanced Security
These days, consumers are becoming more and more wary about protecting their account information when making purchases in person and online. With recent credit card system breaches affecting larger and larger swaths of the population, they’d be foolish not to. Since Apple Pay relies on encrypted near-field communications (NFC) technology for point-of-sale transactions, and SSL encryption to transmit transaction data online, it’s far more resilient against unauthorized access. It also relies on the generation of single-use security codes, which means that retailers will never have any user account data to protect after each transaction completes.
It Has Broad Compatibility
One of the challenges that businesses (and especially those with physical locations) face when integrating a new payment service is the complexity of getting it to work with their existing point-of-sale systems. In the case of Apple Pay, however, that’s almost never an issue. To begin with, Apple makes it easy for eCommerce merchants using WooCommerce to accept Apple Pay through integrations with payment processors such as Square and Stripe, who have the capability already built-in. That means most online and in-store retailers may already have the ability to make use of Apple Pay, and for those that don’t, it should be an easy addition.
It Helps Attract a Larger Customer Base
By now, it should go without saying that Apple has mastered the art of driving customer demand. Now that Apple Pay is available on every modern iOS device, they’re hard at work getting users to sign up for and use the service. For retailers, that means adding Apple Pay will let them take advantage of Apple’s marketing prowess and reap the rewards as motivated users look to make purchases using the latest Apple tech.
It May Soon be a Global Standard
Although nobody truly knows what the future will hold, a glance at the present reveals one certain thing: the future of mobile payments will belong to Apple or Samsung. The two mobile titans have been vying for control of the entire smartphone market for years, and mobile payments are another extension of that war. So far, though, Samsung’s competing service, Samsung Pay, has suffered a string of embarrassing security failures, making the ascendance of Apple Pay a fait accompli. In that case, it’s all but certain that the earliest adopters will see the greatest share of the rewards for being on the winning side of the battle.
The bottom line here is that retailers of all stripes should consider adding Apple Pay to their list of accepted payment options. Doing so provides benefits for the business and its customers alike, with no real downside to speak of. In many cases, adding Apple Pay could also be as simple as enabling an option in an existing payment system. With upsides like that, this is as close to a slam-dunk decision as any business owner will find.
If you’re ready to prepare your business to accept Apple Pay, contact us today and we’ll help you build a new eCommerce system for your website—or upgrade your current one—to keep it up-to-date and ready to integrate the latest and greatest technology.
