It's hard to come by hard data on consumers actually using mobile wallets to pay in stores, but these consumers do exist.
According to a survey of consumers who visit the shopping website Retale.com, 43% of respondents have used a mobile device to make a purchase inside a retail store. That’s up from 36% who one year ago reported using a mobile wallet to make an in-store payment in Retale’s first such survey.
Retale, which provides local, aggregated discounts and deals for consumers online and via its mobile app, surveyed 1,000 consumers about their mobile payment preferences between Dec. 1-5, 2015.
Half of the survey respondents said they’d be most likely to use PayPal if they were making an in-store payment using a mobile device during the 2015 holiday season, and 27% said they would be most likely to pay in stores with their bank’s mobile payment app. Twenty percent of respondents said they would be most likely to use Apple Pay and 17% said they would likely use Android Pay.
The results suggest familiarity and trust will play a key role in driving
In the weeks following Retale’s survey,
“PayPal and mobile banking apps still own the mobile payments market,” said Pat Dermody, Retale’s president, in a December press release. “As shoppers grow accustomed to using services like Apple Pay and Android Pay, those numbers will shift but there might be too much fragmentation to drive significant increases [in existing consumer preferences]—at least in the short term,” she said.
And consumers increasingly expect retailers to support mobile payments in stores. Sixty-three percent of respondents said they believe retailers should offer an in-store mobile payment option, compared with 57% surveyed a year earlier.
Respondents to Retale’s survey apparently have few complaints about mobile payment technology so far. Eighty-three percent said they think mobile payments are convenient, compared with 76% who reported the same a year ago, while the percentage of consumers who think mobile payments are inconvenient dropped to 17% this year from 24% a year ago.
The top concerns for consumers using mobile payments are unchanged from last year: 59% are worried about data breaches and privacy issues, and 55% are concerned about the possible loss or theft of their mobile device.
