4 Reasons Why Your App Should Jump on the Apple Pay Bandwagon Retooling your app to accept Apple Pay is worthwhile for the enhanced security and convenience, both of which customers demand.
By Chris Beauchamp Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
It's been a month since Apple Pay was released with iOS 8.1, and it's been lauded as a game-changer for near-field communication (NFC) payments – Juniper Research predicts NFC users will quintuple to more than 500 million by 2019. While there have been a variety of options for consumers to use their smartphones while paying, Google Wallet and PayPal never quite caught on. They lacked the ease of use, market awareness and consistency that Apple Pay can provide both consumers and merchants. If you're debating on incorporating Apple Pay into your app, there's good reason to.
1. Security.
Word of a new hack comes so often it doesn't even faze the tech community. Companies large and small are susceptible. While your customers' security should always be a priority, Apple Pay will take things up a notch. Apple seems to have removed itself from the process so that only the consumer's bank sees the transaction, and purchases are confirmed with a fingerprint, so your wallet is safe even if your phone is lost.
In a privacy-paranoid world (often rightly so), this is a big perk for consumers and merchants. Safety for your customers means more trust in your app, and less likelihood of you having to deal with a security crisis. Additionally, displaying security logos and compliance information on check-out pages has been shown to reduce fears and lessen the likelihood of consumers abandoning their carts. Apple Pay could soon become a sign to consumers that their data is safe.
Related: Why Apple Pay Could Be a Game Changer for Businesses
2. App loyalty.
We know that consumers are fickle. Whether its poor customer service or a slow app, users will drop you like a hat if you can't keep up with the personalized, need-it-now urgency we see in today's consumer culture. Apple Pay can speed up that process immensely. New customers won't need to worry about inputting a credit card number, and you'll keep customers coming back if they know the process is smooth and simple.
3. New customers.
Starbucks showed us that consumers would use mobile payments – and even pay ahead! – if they were presented with loyalty rewards. Want to bring in new customers? Entice them with a discount if they use Apple Pay. That small gift can be exactly what lures them to you, and if the transaction goes smoothly, they may just stick around.
Related: 4 Ways Adopting Apple Pay Can Benefit Small Business
4. Beware of outside services.
The average iOS app depends on around six cloud services. These can range from Facebook for logins to Amazon Web Services for storage and Flurry for analytics. These interconnected services can have a lot to do with an app's success, because not only does your app need to be free of crashes, but so do the services it depends on.
Of course no app or service is immune to problems, but Apple Pay will also minimize the number of service calls your app has to do, offloading them to a faster, more simplified process on the technical side. The initial headache of updating your app will pay-off big time with the increased sales and ease of use on your side of the product as well.
Related: Apple Pay May Be the Creative Leap That Outmaneuvers Samsung
