40 Percent Of U.S. Online Shoppers Say They Want To Use Mobile Payment

A new survey has 40 percent of U.S. online shoppers saying that they like the idea of mobile payments and prefer that idea to carrying around a wallet. How much that interest in using mobile payments will translate to shoppers actually using mobile payments is the big question.

That said, the fact that such a high percentage of shoppers are even saying that they like the idea certainly is an encouraging first step. “Convenience is a strong force for consumers—and a big unmet need,” said Hayley A. Silver, Vice President of Bizrate Insights, a division of Connexity and the people who ran the survey. “But whether or not Apple Pay becomes the standard for wallet-less payment systems still remains to be seen given that only 32 percent of online buyers see this method as more secure than swiping their credit card at a store.”

There’s not necessarily a contradiction between those two figures. Consumers can certainly like the idea of mobile payments without being in love with any particular current deployment of it. It also might be a reaction to the tonnage of media coverage of Apple Pay. Given that a relatively tiny number of shoppers today even have the option of trying Apple Pay—they need the latest phones, which are still back ordered and hard to get, as well as finding a store that accepts Apple Pay, which is also not that easy yet.

The survey found that more than half of iPhone 6/6+ owners and intended owners would try Apple Pay (53 percent); further, half of this group believes that Apple Pay is more secure that swiping a credit card in a store. The survey showed Generations X and Y both favor using a phone for payment over carrying around a wallet (46 percent and 54 percent respectively), according to a story in Multichannel Merchant. “This same Bizrate Insights survey found that 76 percent of online buyers are dissatisfied with the strength of credit card security among retailers.”