Modern payment methods such as Apple Pay are gaining popularity among consumers. One study projected a total of 45.4 million American Apple Pay users by the end of 2022; another projects the platform to account for 10 percent of all global credit card transactions by the end of 2025.
While there are many different digital payment platforms, all offering their own flavor of payment technologies, Apple is one of the pioneers. (Because Apple Pay is geared towards maximizing convenience and security for the cardholder, it also happens to be one of our favorites here at Curbstone.)
Most importantly: the benefits of Apple Pay aren’t just for customers. The convenience and security are also extended to merchants who choose to support Apple’s payment technologies.
What does that mean for you as a merchant?
With more Apple users relying on their phones for contactless payments, now is the time to consider accepting Apple Pay and other alternative payment methods. These methods can be used across multiple sales channels, from retail counters that use NFC (near field communication) terminals to e-commerce websites and mobile applications. This gives you considerable versatility once you go live.
Apple Pay can increase sales
From a customer’s perspective, technology is only continuing to become more integrated in our daily lives. It’s becoming more common for a person to have a mobile device on them than their wallet or credit card.
Alternative payment solutions embrace this concept. With Apple Pay, merchants can capture more opportunities for a sale. Customers who left their wallet or purse at home but remembered their cell phone or watch can now continue with a cardless payment.
Apple Pay can make payments faster and easier
Digital payments make transactions faster. That means shorter lines at your checkout counter and fewer opportunities for online shoppers to abandon transactions if they find it too inconvenient to manually enter their credit card number, expiration date, and CVV on every checkout page. Lower abandonment rates mean more revenue.
Apple Pay can increase security
When customers make a purchase using Apple Pay, the cardholder’s card data is never shared with you as a merchant. Card numbers aren’t stored on the customer’s device or on Apple’s servers. The only time that you receive personal information is in the case of an online purchase, where the customer’s name and address are required to ship the item. That means that you aren’t processing, storing, or transmitting cardholder data on your system.
This concept is like Curbstone’s PLP e-commerce solution, which removes the merchant’s web server from PCI scope. (Like Curbstone, Apple uses payment tokens to process transactions, which prevents unauthorized access of the actual card data.) Generally speaking – regardless of processing method – the less sensitive data you handle as a merchant – the more secure your approach and the lower your burden of compliance.
How to accept Apple Pay as a business
Merchants who wish to support Apple Pay can do so on their own. By signing up with Apple and following their documentation, your web developers can code and manage their Apple Pay deployment.
Apple’s boarding process can be challenging, but not impossible. However, it’s important to keep in mind:
- Apple Pay is not a payment processor. You’ll need to have an existing merchant account to start accepting Apple Pay payments.
- If you’re planning to accept Apple Pay for in-person transactions, you’ll need to have NFC-enabled credit card readers. If you’re currently using older terminals or POS systems, you may need to upgrade your hardware.
There’s also the option of using a third-party payments company to simplify the Apple Pay setup process. With Apple’s Mass Enablement, a company like Curbstone can perform all the requisite registration efforts on your behalf. This removes almost all the responsibility from your team and reduces the resource requirements to get started. In this case, you can sign up through the existing implementation of Apple Pay with the third-party processor. All you then have to do is deploy the (often stock) code for Apple Pay on your site.
Let Curbstone help you add Apple Pay to your payments ecosystem
At Curbstone, we make payments simple. Over 20+ years in the industry, our team has helped hundreds of merchants keep pace with emerging technologies.
If you’re ready to increase security and improve consumer confidence with more modern payment methods, we’re here to help.
