Apple Pay adds two major retailers as future spots for customers to use the smartphone payment method. As the following TechCrunch story reports, both CVS and 7-Eleven have signed up to accept Apple Pay later this year.
Longtime Apple Pay holdout CVS will finally be adding support for Apple’s mobile payments platform this fall, along with 7-Eleven, Apple CEO Tim Cook said this afternoon on the company’s earnings call.
The news is particularly notable because CVS was one of the first major retailers to snub Apple Pay, choosing instead to launch its own barcode-based mobile payments solution “CVS Pay” back in 2016, following the failure of the retailer-backed Apple Pay rival CurrentC.
CVS Pay had become the first mobile payments solution the pharmacy chain adopted, after having purposefully avoided support for Apple Pay or any other rival NFC (tap to pay) technologies at its register. The company believed there was value in offering its own end-to-end solution to customers that combined both payments and loyalty, it had said.
In addition, CVS had earlier backed an Apple Pay alternative called CurrentC, which was developed by the merchant consortium MCX, led by major retailers like Walmart, Best Buy, Rite Aid and others. The QR code-based payments solution was designed to challenge Apple’s potential dominance in mobile payments. Many of the retailers even blocked Apple Pay at their stores in advance of bringing CurrentC to market.
That it has now decided to also support Apple Pay is a major win for Apple, as is the addition of 7-Eleven to the list of retailers that will soon offer Apple Pay at checkout.
Two nice wins for Apple at merchants that are sweet spots for mobile payments—quick stop shopping for mostly low dollar items in high traffic areas. Now if only mainstream consumers would take to in-store mobile payments. Mercator’s CustomerMonitor Survey Series as well as other payment studies have shown sluggish or no growth for Apple Pay. Merchants do so little promotion for in-store mobile payments that many shoppers don’t even know they are accepted. Meanwhile, only the most ardent mobile app users seem to be trying mobile pay on a regular basis, say 3 or 4 times a month. So while it’s nice to add more mobile pay acceptance locations, real growth will come when payment providers adopt a more proactive and engaging marketing campaign.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Associate Director, Research Sevices at Mercator Advisory Group
