Apple Pay for Merchants

Digital wallets are new payment solutions offered by a wide variety of operating system and device manufacturers that allow users to store an entire wallet’s worth of cards in digital format on their smartphones, tablets, and even watches. Apple Pay is the digital wallet that comes stock on all iPhones and all new MacBooks, making it a go-to payment option for a legion of Apple users and positioning it to account for 10% of all card transactions by 2025. 

Apple Pay and competitors like Samsung Pay and Google Pay allow users to store unlimited payment cards as well as some loyalty cards. That enables users to forgo the need to carry around a bulky wallet or fish around for cards at checkout. But the major benefit digital wallets offer consumers is convenience. Setting a default payment card enables Apple Pay users to pay in-store by simply tapping their phone against a contactless payment terminal, the same way they would with a chip-enabled credit or debit card. On the web, purchases can be made equally quickly with a single click, eliminating the need to login to pay or to enter payment details line by line. 

How Apple Pay Benefits Merchants

Apple Pay and other digital wallets like it offer a number of significant benefits to merchants as well. Those benefits revolve primarily around growing consumer desire for a wide variety of payment options and the fraud deterrence offered by the security built into digital wallets. 

Consumer Choice

Modern consumers demand choice, and failing to give it to them can easily push them into the waiting arms of a competitor. That’s especially important in a post-COVID world, in which 65% of consumers say they intend to keep using contactless payments as much or more than they have during the pandemic. Adopting Apple Pay ensures customers will have the choice they demand in contactless payments while also maximizing convenience and streamlining their checkout experience. That has the potential to be a major difference-maker in a sales environment where customer loyalty is a thing of the past and quality of shopping experience is everything. 

Heightened Security

Another major benefit digital wallets offer merchants is heightened security over standard transactions. Digital wallets like Apple Pay offer an effectively instant payment experience, but when the customer is tapping their card or clicking the buy button, they also have to go through a biometric identify verification. In the case of Apple Pay, that’s done using either a fingerprint scan using Touch ID, or a facial scan using Face ID. Both take a second and require almost nothing on the user-end, but that additional biometric safeguard means that making fraudulent transactions with Apple Pay is extremely difficult, if not impossible. That advanced security minimizes the chances a merchant will fall victim to costly fraud and makes defending chargebacks easier. 

Getting Started with Apple Pay

One of Apple Pay’s biggest selling points is how easy it is to adopt. Whether a merchant sells in a brick and mortar store, online, or both, getting set up to accept Apple Pay can often be done without fuss through simple equipment upgrades. Many merchants already have the software they need to start accepting Apple Pay right away. 

Online

Getting an online store set up with Apple Pay is often as easy as enabling the option in a merchant’s ecommerce software. There are some requirements, namely that merchants have SSL enabled and follow Apple’s Acceptable Use Guidelines, but both should be no issue as they represent best practices anyway. Enabling Apple Pay in the payments dashboards of the most popular ecommerce systems like BigCommerce, Shopify, and WooCommerce will automatically create an Apple Pay button that users can click to bypass checkout completely, finishing their purchase instead with the payment data stored in their digital wallet.

In-Store

Accepting Apple Pay in-store is even easier than enabling it online, because Apple Pay and all other leading digital wallets require nothing more than standard contactless payment hardware to operate. A merchant with a modern EMV-compliant contactless payment terminal is already set up to accept Apple Pay, whether they realize it or not. Businesses without contactless payment hardware need only contact their merchant services provider to modernize their systems – a good idea anyway, considering that tap payments with credit and debit cards are becoming the standard. Once the new contactless hardware is installed, Apple Pay and all major competing digital wallets can be immediately accepted. 

If you’re a merchant looking to get your online or brick and mortar store set up with Apple Pay, partnering with BAMS ensures you’ll have the contactless hardware and ecommerce integrations you need to start offering your customers the speed, convenience, and security of digital wallet payments. BAMS also offers the guaranteed lowest and most transparent pricing in the industry, making a BAMS merchant account an easy choice. To find out more about how BAMS can help you modernize your payments and save money on your monthly merchant statements, request your free five-step price comparison today!