Best Buy Will Accept Apple Pay In All U.S. Stores Later This Year

Back when Apple Pay was first launched, Best Buy wanted none of it. As a part of the MCX consortium, they were a part of an effort among retailers to build a mobile payments system of their own: CurrentC.

It seems Best Buy has changed its mind. 6 months later, Best Buy is jumping on the Apple Pay train.

Best Buy will begin accepting Apple Pay within its iOS app today, and will accept Apple Pay in all U.S. stores later this year.

It appears that Best Buy intends to stay involved with CurrentC/MCX moving forward, with a Best Buy spokesperson saying the company will “remain invested in MCX.” Regardless, this is a pretty massive hit to those efforts. If CurrentC was the only way to pay with your phone at Best Buy, it might win the service of a few new users. Now it’s an also-ran alternative to the platform built right into iOS — and that’s not going to hook anyone.

With Lydia, Pay From Apple Watch for Your Online Purchases

Step by step, Lydia is unveiling its product strategy to handle all your payments. When I last covered the French startup, it was still mostly focused on growing its user base by providing a Venmo alternative for French users. But now, Lydia also lets you pay on e-commerce websites, starting with PriceMinister. The app is now also available on the Apple Watch so that you can just tap on your watch notification to order something online.

“We think that Lydia’s mission is to make it easier to use your money,” co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche told me. “We don’t want to be a great app to pay back your friends, nor a great app to pay online. We want to offer as many use cases as possible to our users.”

There are now three use cases for Lydia. The Venmo-like feature lets you pay back your friends in a few taps without having to pay any fee. It uses your good old debit card to pay someone. And if you don’t want to keep any money in the app, you can withdraw it to your bank account — it’s free as well.

Second, retail stores can accept Lydia in addition to cash and cards. When someone wants to pay using Lydia, they can open the app, enter the amount and show a QR code to the merchant. Merchants have to pay 0.3 percent per transaction and a monthly plan between €4.90 and €49.90. It is a lot cheaper than credit card terminals.

Finally, e-commerce websites will soon get a “Pay with Lydia” button as well. When you click on the button and Lydia detects that you already have the app based on your phone number, the company’s servers send a push notification to your phone. You open the app, enter your PIN code, select your debit card and you are done.

Once again, Lydia bets on very low fees to attract e-commerce merchants. Processing a transaction costs 1.5 percent and a fixed €0.06 fee — it’s much cheaper than PayPal or Stripe. “Before launching our e-commerce offering, we needed a great user experience, and of course fraud protection and very low fees,” Chiche said.

And the user experience is even better if you have an Apple Watch, because the notification will show up on your wrist. It’s totally optional, but early Apple Watch users should appreciate the integration. And it’s true that tapping on your wrist sounds much easier than typing your credit card number.

The company raised $3.9 million late last year (€3.6 million) from XAnge Private Equity, Belcube and Duval’s family office. Now, it is facing an important challenge. If it wants to become a ubiquitous payment solution on the web, it still needs to convince multiple big e-commerce partners to work with the company.

Apple Pay growth comes at a huge loss for PayPal, study shows

Apple Pay is still picking up momentum, but it may come at a cost to competing services. A new report provided to TechnoBuffalo by 451 Research reveals that Cupertino’s mobile payment growth is taking a big bite out of PayPal’s service.

The study, which polled 4,168 people mostly in North America, focused on general interest in mobile payments along with specific services. The results indicate that while the market may be growing overall, Apple seems to be vacuuming up most of that growth.

Mobile payments still aren’t particularly popular, with just 11 percent of people saying they were “very likely” to use a service like Apple Pay and 14 percent saying they were “somewhat likely.” However, 451 Research notes that interest is up a full six points compared to a year ago.

Breaking those results down by platform, 34 percent of iPhone owners were pro mobile payments, followed by 16 percent for Android, 13 percent for BlackBerry and 5 percent for Windows Phone.

When asked which mobile payment app they actually planned to use, Apple Pay performed even better among consumers, grabbing 45 percent (up from 40 percent in December) of the polled market. PayPal came in second at 28 percent (down from last year), followed by Google Wallet at 13 percent (up slightly from last year).

Apple Pay also beats PayPal and Google Wallet when it comes to customer satisfaction, scoring a 66 percent in the study. Google’s alternative came in at just 33 percent, with PayPal doing a little better with 45 percent customer satisfaction.

For now Apple clearly has the advantage, but as mobile payments continue to grow, that may not always be the case. After all, some people don’t even own an iPhone, so there’s a huge block of Android owners who don’t have access to Apple Pay. It’s possible, too, that Samsung’s new Samsung Pay service will start to pull users away from Apple Pay.