Half of Top 100 Merchants in US Will Accept Apple Pay in 2015

[Maura]

iDownload Blog reports today that according to a new Reuters report, an Apple spokesperson has said that by the end of 2015 Apple expects that around half of the top 100 merchants in the US will be accepting Apple Pay in their stores.

The spokesperson said that Apple is frequently in contact with the merchants that they want to adopt Apple Pay, and that half of those that they have contacted have expressed that they intend to support Apple Pay before the end of the year. And as far as the remaining 50 or so of that top 100 merchants is concerned, the Apple spokesperson says that the company expects “many more” to take up Apple Pay in 2016.

The Reuters article seems to dwell more on the fact that nearly two-thirds of the retailers that it spoke to said that they “categorically” would not be accepting Apple Pay this year, and less than a quarter said that they currently accept Apple Pay.

Reuters said that the main reasons the merchants gave for not accepting Apple Pay were lack of customer demand, costly technology to implement the service, and lack of access to data generated during an Apple Pay transaction, due to Apple’s strict user data privacy policy.

Source: Apple says half of top 100 U.S. merchants will accept Apple Pay this year