The Up-And-Down Edition: Bitcoin, Chase Pay And Amazon Prices

While the holiday clock starts softly counting down when the calendar turns to Nov. 1, the real excitement kicks in on Thanksgiving once the dinner dishes are cleared, the coffee and dessert is finished and family members retreat to their separate corners to start their holiday shopping on their laptops, tablets and phones.

Payments players are retiring to their respective corners, too, girding for the holiday shopping frenzy and ensuring that everything runs according to plan. And because we know you’re on the go, we have your quick rap on the most interesting adventures that happened last week in payments and commerce land.

Bitcoin’s Wild Ride 

Bitcoin started last week with a whimper and ended it with a bang. The week kicked off with bitcoin’s price crashing 25 percent in a single day over a missed software upgrade, and larger concerns about a looming bubble led to a sell-off. It was trading well below $5,000 for about 24 hours.

The panic was over a plan to split the digital currency.

The new version of bitcoin proposed by one large, powerful faction of users would theoretically be faster and trade more easily. However, there is also another faction, consisting of bitcoin’s main software developers, who are rather angrily opposed. The software change would have roughly doubled the network’s processing capacity, or the number of bitcoin transactions the network can handle.

However, the kafuffle was short-lived, and by Monday (Nov. 13), bitcoin’s price had rallied to $6,400.

And that rally continued throughout the week. By Friday, the cryptocurrency had either come within $2 of trading at $8,000 per unit or exceeded that mark by $40, depending on whose figures and set of adjustments you like. As of the time of this story (Nov. 19), the price of bitcoin was just shy of $7,800 per coin, with experts predicting that hitting “$8,000 seems in the cards.”

But even those experts noted caution, since the projected price of bitcoin has turned out to be one of this year’s more challenging forecasts to make.

A Wholly Organic Thanksgiving, From Amazon 

When Amazon acquired Whole Foods last summer, among their goals was bringing every consumer affordable access to organic foods. While that might have sounded like vague marketing language at the time, it got a little clearer this week. Amazon’s Whole Foods announced that they plan to make organic food accessible and affordable to every consumer at once – on the same day that most Americans eat, more or less, the same food.

In preparation for this Thanksgiving, Whole Foods customers can buy selected turkeys at reduced prices (organic for $3.49/lb. and antibiotic-free for $2.49/lb.). That alone is a fairly good deal, as organic turkeys typically range from $4 to $6 per pound depending upon just how organically the turkeys were raised (regular vs. pasture raised, vegetarian free-range, etc.).

But the deal gets notably better for Amazon Prime members, who will see the prices go down to $2.99/lb. for organic and $1.99/lb. for no antibiotic, while supplies last.

To purchase the discount turkeys, customers must go to Amazon.com/turkey to get the necessary coupon to present when they go to physically pick up their Thanksgiving birds.

This creates some friction at checkout from a brand that has traded on eliminating friction – but it’s something they’re hoping consumers will tolerate in exchange for saving $15 to $18 on the bird they’ll stick in their ovens early Thursday morning.

Grocery savings will also span chicken breasts, shrimp and holiday favorites like canned pumpkin, organic broccoli, organic salad mixes, organic russet potatoes and organic sweet potatoes.

All of these price cuts are in addition to the deals that customers have already seen from Amazon’s first round of price reductions.

“These are the latest new lower prices in our ongoing integration and innovation with Amazon, and we’re just getting started,” said John Mackey, Whole Foods Market co-founder and CEO. “In the few months we’ve been working together, our partnership has proven to be a great fit. We’ll continue to work closely together to ensure we’re consistently surprising and delighting our customers while moving toward our goal of reaching more people with Whole Foods Market’s high-quality, natural and organic food.”

Gobble, gobble.

Also, if you’re making use of this deal, you might want to hop over to Walmart, where butter is on sale – we have it on good authority that ethical turkey can be a bit dry.

Chase Runs The Mobile Payments Marathon (Slowly) 

It’s not easy igniting mobile payments in the United States, said everyone who has tried in the last half decade.

And Chase Pay was officially added to their roster this week, as recent data indicated that the tryout rate for Chase’s emergent effort into mobile payments hasn’t managed to break out of the single digits after two years in the marketplace and its $100 million price tag.

JPMorgan doesn’t directly disclose financial details about Chase Pay, but a May survey from Bernstein Research gave it a ninth-place ranking among U.S. mobile wallets, with only 6 percent of online shoppers reporting they’d used it.

“We said from day one that changing customer behavior would be tough,” JPMorgan spokeswoman Trish Wexler said, with respect to Chase Pay. “But we’re Chase, and our customers expect us to lean into the future and learn what we can now, so we’re ready when they are.”

PayPal – the holder of the No. 1 spot – had a 61 percent use rate. Visa Checkout, in the second spot, was reported to have 20 percent usage, with Amazon in the third spot at 16 percent. Apple Pay and Android Pay rank with 12 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

But Chase Pay is notably in it for the long game, and is shifting its adoption strategy to a more partnership-based model for its mobile payments platform.

“We’re trying to get Chase Pay embedded in as many places as possible,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said at an industry conference in September. “We’ll see how it pans out.”

Those embeds include some very large merchants: Walmart, Best Buy, Starbucks and Target, for example. And those rollouts also include partnerships with payments industry players, like PayPal.

In July, the two firms announced a 2018 partnership that will make it easier for Chase customers to add cards from Chase Pay to PayPal’s app. The deal would also let the customers use Chase rewards points to pay for goods and services through PayPal.

But, The Wall Street Journal reported, even those cooperative relationships are still undergirded with competitiveness in the mobile arena.

Although Walmart accepts Chase Pay, it is understandably more interested in pursuing its own mobile wallet effort in Walmart Pay. PayPal’s Venmo is beginning to creep into the major merchants of the physical world: In 2018, West Elm and Pottery Barn will accept both PayPal and Venmo for the first time.

And speaking of PayPal, it didn’t get to that 61 percent idly or by accident. PayPal is the longest player in the digital payments game – and, according to the latest count by Morgan Stanley, is accepted at 377 of nearly 500 top online merchants.

Chase Pay, meanwhile, was accepted by only four.

But Chase Pay is pushing forward, recently referring to it as one of the bank’s technology investments that would show “significant future benefits.”

So, what is the moral of the story this week? Stay tuned, things change fast. By the time you read this, the price of bitcoin might be $8,000, or it might radically plummet to $5,000 – even the best in the business aren’t entirely sure. Chase Pay isn’t igniting, but it’s also not doing astonishingly worse than anyone – except PayPal, who, by the numbers, is beating everyone and has been for a long time. And it might end up being a very Whole Foods Thanksgiving for a lot of Prime members, who have a reason to actually upgrade their taste in turkeys this year.

Happy Thanksgiving!