Is Apple Pay right for your website?

Michael Stineman, Executive Vice President, Growth

Michael Stineman

Executive Vice President, Growth

A person holding a cell phone

With 1 million new signups a week, Apple Pay has taken off. The one-click technology developed by its namesake allows iPhone and iPad users to upload their personal credit and debit card information to a mobile wallet and pay with a single fingerprint.

Last week, Apple made headlines when the company announced that Apple Pay would be available on websites using Apple’s Safari browser. (The technology is currently only available for use on apps.) Big name retailers such as 1–800-Flowers have already expressed interest in signing up.

Given the market potential, it’s worth asking: Is Apple Pay right for your website?

The numbers certainly say so. On the face of it, Apple Pay may make sense when you look at the high volume of new subscribers, the volume of Apple Pay-enabled iPhones being sold (almost 75 million units worldwide in the first quarter of 2016), and the fact that a PYMENTS and InfoScout survey found that 23.8% of respondents have tried Apple Pay and 21.3% use it as much as possible.

But in order to make a more accurate assessment, you need to dig a bit deeper. The key question is whether or not Apple Pay will really benefit your users. To answer this, you first need to determine:

  • What percentage of your users are using Apple Safari?
  • What percentage of those users are converting today?

Odds are after doing this analysis, you won’t be able to remove your existing payment options, and will be adding Apple Pay to the checkout process. If you look at 1–800-Flowers.com, for instance, there is already a variety of one-click checkout options, including:

Maybe the number of diehard Apple Safari users on your site warrants this addition, but that is a question that needs to be answered based on your own site analytics. Given the continued proliferation of mobile payment options, it may be too early to go down this road, unless your consumer base truly warrants it.

Whether Apple Pay is right for you now or not, there’s a bigger, more exciting trend at work. We have moved one step closer to a world where one click can buy us anything, anywhere. And the tedious checkout process that we know today is a forgotten relic of the past.

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