Whatever problems some Visa cardholders had using Apple Pay during a service outage earlier this week, it was likely a drop in the bucket relative to the overall low usage of the mobile wallet.
Among the findings from a consumer survey on mobile payments in the U.S. that First Annapolis Consulting released yesterday (Feb. 11) are that, while awareness levels of Apple Pay are high, the same cannot be said regarding actual usage rates of the service.
Of the 580 iPhone 6 users that were polled in Dec. 2015, only 20 percent reported having used Apple Pay at least once — a 2 percent decline from First Annapolis’ spring survey. Even fewer — 15 percent — said they used it more than once a month (another drop from the spring survey, when the number was 19 percent).
Those low numbers cannot likely be attributed to a lack of awareness of Apple’s mobile wallet, as 73 percent of the survey respondents (numbering about 1,300) reported to have heard of Apple Pay (while that number rises to 84 percent among the iPhone 6 users).
“High awareness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the success of a new payment service such as Apple Pay,” Hugh Gallagher, a principal at First Annapolis, commented in a press release.
“These research results demonstrate that Apple Pay has had a moderately successful launch, with low consumer usage but positive customer experiences to date. The latter represents an important first step towards longer-term adoption,” continued Gallagher. “While early adoption of Apple Pay may not be as high as expected — and appears to have plateaued since the initial launch in Oct. 2014 — usage is likely to continue to increase with the proliferation of other mobile payment solutions (e.g., Android Pay, Samsung Pay, CurrentC, Chase Pay, etc.), which should expand the merchant acceptance base and broaden the availability and visibility of mobile payments in general.”
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