It’s All About the Money- Apple Pay Not Catching On; Amazon Taking on PayPal

Some people in the tech media are noticing how Apple hasn’t said much…if anything…about Apple Pay. The nextweb.com points out that Apple Pay has been out for 8 months in Europe now, and longer in the US, and not a peep from Cupertino about how many users, transactions, etc. the site got some information from Transport for London, and since Apple Pay is the only smartphone pay app available there right now, calculated it’s less than half of one percent of those transactions. Part of the problem may be availability, not the people don’t want to use it. Personally, the only places I go that have Apple Pay are Trader Joe’s and Panera Bread. I’ve always been an early adapter, but it seems that after a year and a half, more places would offer it. It may be a lot slower road to contactless payments than everybody thought.

Speaking of separating you from your money faster and easier, Amazon just announced the spread of its payments service, Amazon Payments, to more third party websites. They have dubbed it the Amazon Payments Global Partner Program, and the online giant is working to help e-commerce platform providers and other developers integrate with Amazon Payments for use at checkout. Amazon already offered ‘Login and Pay with Amazon’ to individual merchants. Payments allows merchants to tap into Amazon’s already gigantic user base, and eliminate the need for these customers to create a separate username and password on the merchant’s website. By making checkout quicker, it presumably increases sales.