Add Target stores to the list of brick-and-mortar merchants going contactless. As the following Retail Dive article reports, Target will be accepting the universal mobile pays as well as contactless Mastercard and Visa cards.
Target announced it will accept contactless payments, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay and contactless cards from Visa and Mastercard at all of its roughly 1,850 U.S. store locations, according to the retailer’s A Bullseye View blog.
Checkout terminals at Target stores will now have an activated contactless symbol, allowing shoppers who have enabled mobile payment capability on their smartphones or wearables to pay by holding the device near the terminal’s card reader. Shoppers with contactless credit or debit cards can tap their cards on the reader screen to pay.
In addition to gaining acceptance at Target in the coming weeks, Apple Pay will now also be accepted in-store at all 3,000 Speedway locations and more than 245 Hy-Vee stores in the Midwest, according to an Apple press release. In the next few months, more than 7,000 Taco Bell and 2,200 Jack in the Box locations will adopt it as well.
Contactless payments are gathering momentum at merchant POS checkouts especially among the universal mobile pays Apple, Google, and Samsung. The real question is whether consumers will choose to use these mobile methods more frequently than they have been. Integrated merchant mobile apps that do more than just make a payment have seen rising success such as at Starbucks and Dunkin’. However, the universal pays are achieving widespread acceptance across many merchant brands. But as Mastercard and Visa offer more contactless plastic cards with cashback and other loyalty rewards, many consumers may still not gravitate to pay with their smartphones.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Director, Merchant Services at Mercator Advisory Group
