What Happened
Want to use Apple Pay at your local Walmart? Well, you may have to wait a lot longer. Today the national retail giant started rolling out its own mobile payment solution Walmart Pay to over 4,600 stores across the U.S. Walmart first started testing the payment app in select markets last December, allowing customers to pay via their iOS and Android devices with almost all major credit cards, debit cards, and Walmart gift cards. The big-box retailer says it already counts 24 million registered users for its mobile app. The nationwide roll-out came right after Walmart launched its free two-day shipping program last week. Together, these two initiatives point to Walmart’s plan of employing mobile payment and expedited delivery to improve the shopping experience it provides so as to better compete with rivals.
What Retailers Need To Do
By officially launching its own mobile payment system, Walmart is once again saying “no” to third-party mobile payment solutions and taking full control of its check-out experience. Time will tell if customers will forgo the native payment solutions on their phones and opt for Walmart Pay. In the meantime, Walmart will get to enjoy the perks of owning its digital payment solution, which helps it to simplify the process of tying purchase data to individual customer profiles for retargeting purposes. As more and more customers incorporate mobile devices into their shopping trips, it would greatly benefit brick-and-mortar retailers to devise a digital payment strategy and incorporate existing reward and loyalty programs into point of sale systems.
For more on what retailers can do to reach today’s connected shoppers across sales channels, please check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.
Source: ZDNet
