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Retailers like nothing more than for a new customer to become a familiar customer, and that seems to be happening with a portion of Apple Pay users, finds a report from Auriemma Consulting Group.
New York-based Auriemma says data from its Apple Pay tracker survey, which canvasses Apple Pay use every eight weeks, found that 75% of consumers who made a successful Apple Pay purchase in a store made repeat purchases at the same location. More than two in five respondents in the survey of 500 iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners used Apple Pay at least once.
That is a higher-than-expected usage rate for a product that just became operational four months ago, says Marianne Berry, managing director of Auriemma’s Payments Insights division. “Beyond just that fact, the repeat usage is quite high and that’s at the same merchant,” Berry tells Digital Transactions News. “It’s not just people trying it once or twice for the novelty value. We’re seeing repeat usage.”
Notable, too, is the 37% of Apple Pay users that use the in-store function and the in-app payment capability.
Despite most attention being paid to the in-store use of Apple Pay, Berry says the in-app purchases warrant notice, too. This one-tap payment can alleviate much of the burden consumers experience when trying to type in payment details on smart-phone displays, thus improving mobile-commerce conversions.
Consumer use of Apple Pay also is noteworthy because it’s so strong, and so many users like using it, Berry says. “Any mobile wallet that we’ve looked at in the past has gotten trial numbers in the 2% and 3% percentiles,” she says. “It looks like the adoption curve so far is steeper than anything we’ve seen with any electronic wallet.”
Consumer satisfaction is high, too, with 98% of users choosing the top two boxes on a scale with extremely satisfied at the top. While Berry notes it’s not unusual for consumers who own Apple products to rate them highly, “these numbers are really striking.”
This bodes well for other mobile-payment services, like Samsung Pay and Android wallets, she says. “At the moment, we’re very focused on Apple Pay because it’s clearly the most successful example of what’s going on,” Berry says. “There’s a halo effect for mobile payments generally.”
Mobile-wallet use in general could see another spike as the U.S. payment card industry migrates to EMV chip cards, Berry says. Mobile payments today, compared to a magnetic-stripe transaction, have little or no advantage in convenience or speed. But, as EMV cards become more common, and consumers learn they have to dip the cards into readers and wait, the appeal of tapping a phone against a contactless reader may increase, she says. That could help Apple Pay and other mobile wallets.
