Why Walmart Still Doesn’t Support Apple Pay
Walmart doesn’t accept any form of NFC payment in the United States. It’s not just a limitation on Apple Pay. The retailer doesn’t take Google Pay, Samsung Pay, or even let you tap your contactless physical card to pay.
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When you use Walmart Pay, it’s incredibly easy for Walmart to build that customer profile on you. When you use Scan and Go, all of that same information is handed over.
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One common theory is that Walmart doesn’t support Apple Pay because it doesn’t want to pay fees to Apple. This isn’t true. There are no additional fees for a business to accept Apple Pay. They only pay the standard card processing fees regardless of whether the transaction is contactless or not. Apple’s fee is typically charged to issuing banks.
The article misses the other reason that Walmart has invested in multiple attempts at electronic payments: not paying merchant fees to Visa and Mastercard. That’s why their system requires you hooking up to your bank account directly.
All of Walmart’s attempts at this have been focused on making Walmart’s bottom line better, which is why every one of them has failed, whereas Apple Pay is making my payment experience better, and why I use it all the time.
You can pay via bank or debit card, which Walmart likely prefers, but Walmart Pay does work with credit cards. It seems like the main benefit to them is getting you to install their app.
While TFA is correct that Apple Pay (or Google/Samsung/whatever pay) doesn’t cost WalMart more than a physical credit card - TFA doesn’t mention a highly relevant detail: a phone-app payment company can act as the ‘issuing bank’ and make a tiny fraction of a percent more (like ~0.3%) for being the clearinghouse. Not all phone-pay apps set up as an issuing bank as there’s some overhead but it’s more than worth it if you’re the world’s largest retailer. Note: this fee is not the same as the 2-3% “merchant fee”. The clearinghouse fee is much smaller and never goes back to the merchant - unless the merchant IS is the phone-app company.
Walmart does accept Apple Pay and contactless payments in Canada. I suspect this is because Canadians pretty much expect contactless to be accepted anywhere they shop, compared to in America where there are still many places (restaurants mostly) that have limited support for it.
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In addition to the good points made above, I think another part of it is trying to drive people to the Walmart app to compete with Amazon.
I've mostly managed to avoid Walmart by purposely going to more specialized stores when possible, all of which of course accept whatever form of payment you have because they care about your business.
In the vast majority of America payments are actually not backwards anymore, waiters don't walk off with your credit card, etc. Essentially everywhere accepts contactless payment / Apple Pay / Android Pay / etc now except the specific large corporations like this which have purposely chosen not to.
Last time I checked Walmart Pay is also based on scanning a QR code, which also seems to be a specific choice for people whose phones don't support NFC but do have a camera. Which was arguably a reasonable tradeoff when it started, but is increasingly an unnecessary and inferior choice today.
