Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Wednesday announced its Walmart Pay mobile wallet is now available in all of its 4,612 U.S. stores in all 50 states. The rollout’s completion comes about seven months after the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailing behemoth introduced the product and about 10 weeks after first making the app widely available on an app store. Some 3,500 stores went live on the service in just the past three weeks.
With availability now chainwide, Wal-Mart’s announcement says the wallet has seen a 45% increase in transactions within the past week, without disclosing actual transaction count. Some 88% of transactions have been performed by repeat users, the chain says. “We are encouraged by the uptake we are seeing. As the stores went live, we saw customers pick up the service almost instantly,” a Wal-Mart spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News.
Walmart Pay stores any credit, debit, or prepaid card, as well as Walmart gift cards, and works with both Apple and Android phones. The wallet is part of the Walmart shopping app, which claims some 22 million users. Wallet users link their phones to the point of sale via quick-response codes. “Walmart Pay is like no other mobile-payments solution available today, expanding access to mobile payments and improving the way customers check out in all Walmart stores in the U.S.,” the company’s announcement says.
It doesn’t appear for the moment that Wal-Mart will be promoting Walmart Pay usage with points or other incentives. Instead, it’s betting that swifter checkouts will appeal to harried customers. “For years we have thought of our everyday low prices as our loyalty program,” says the spokesperson. “And our customers have long counted on us to save them money, but now they are looking for us to save them time. Time is a new currency for a busy family.”
Walmart Pay is not Wal-Mart’s only venture in mobile payments. The chain is also a key member of the Merchant Customer Exchange LLC retail consortium, which developed the CurrentC wallet that until recently was being tested in Columbus, Ohio. MCX shut down the pilot last week, leaving MCX’s immediate prospects uncertain. Other MCX backers include major retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Exxon/Mobil.
Some observers like Walmart Pay’s prospects when compared to those of MCX or general-purpose wallets. “The big advantage [Walmart Pay] has over CurrentC is that it’s a single-merchant deployment,” says consultant Rick Oglesby, principal at Mesa, Ariz.-based AZPayments Group LLC and a partner at Double Diamond Group. “It also has the advantage of being a part of the Walmart app, so it has a captive audience of users. It’s also Walmart’s own solution, so Walmart has every incentive to promote its use, which is a big advantage [compared to] general-purpose wallets.”
