Despite many proclamations to the contrary, NFC payments at the point of sale is yet to really take off. It will be sometime before enough merchants upgrade their point of sale terminals for smartphone-owning consumers to leave their plastic cards home.
Nevertheless, as I argue in an upcoming report looking at the status of Apple Pay five months since its launch, the killer use case for mobile payments will not be at the point of sale. Instead, it will be for making purchases in-app or in-browser. Developers already consider iOS a more lucrative market for one simple reason—users of Apple products spend more than Android users. This gulf is likely to widen as more developers integrate Apple Pay into their apps, and paying for things on mobile becomes even easier.
For these reasons, it is imperative that Google improves the payments experience for Android users and it has announced a series of new integrations with developers and merchants:
“Customers that use Android apps from Dunkin’ Donuts and Seamless, and merchants that build online stores through Shopify, will now all be able to access Google Wallet to make and accept quick payments.
The news follows on from an integration in November with Papa John’s Android app, as well as merchant platforms ChowNow and Shopgate. But overall it has been a relatively slow rollout for Google Wallet: before today, there were only around 30 mobile sites and 30 apps integrated with the product.”
Overview by Nikhil Joseph, Analyst, Emerging Technologies Advisory service at
Mercator Advisory Group
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