At least for Staples, Apple Pay is a hit in an unexpected place
An early champion of Apple Pay, Staples is seeing some interesting usage of the mobile payment service.
Prat Vemana, vice president of mobile commerce for the large U.S. office supply chain, recently spoke at a conference in Seattle. According to FierceMobileIT, Vemana said 30 percent of purchases made in the Staples iOS apps are using Apple Pay.
Overall, 70 percent of mobile purchase revenue for the company comes from Apple users.
And interestingly enough, in-store usage of Apple Pay hasn’t been as big of a hit. Here’s more from the story:
Vemana didn’t have statistics for Apple Pay being used by people in stores to make purchases at the register, but he said it hasn’t taken off quite so quickly there. A “healthy” number of people have used it in stores but Apple Pay isn’t among the top three payment types in stores, he said. “On mobile it overtook everything else so I think it will be a slower adoption in stores,” he said.
That definitely comes as a bit of a surprise. But I think the mix of customers shopping online compared to in-store is probably quite different. At least for office supplies and other items that Staples sells, online shoppers are probably more consumer oriented rather than business shoppers.
Currently, Apple Pay can be used for in-store purchases with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Those devices, along with the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3, can make online purchases with the mobile payment system.
The Apple Watch, when it arrives in April, will allow users with an iPhone 5 or iPhone 5s to make purchases with the system.
Earlier today, we published an updated list of the merchants, cards, and apps that accept Apple Pay.
Apple Pay is currently only available in the United States, but it could arrive in Canada as early as March.
A report yesterday said that Apple could be looking to add the service to its Mac line in future models of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Desktop Mac users could take advantage of Apple Pay through a rumored new Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad.
And just this afternoon, Apple competitor Samsung announced that it is entering the market by purchasing LoopPay.
So the mobile payment race looks to have just begun.
