Apple earlier this week announced a handful of retailers that will be the first to offer loyalty card support through Apple Pay, but there’s one company planned for the initial launch that it didn’t mention: Whole Foods. Expect the roll out of other rewards cards to be slow, however, as NFC terminals work to enable support with retailers…
Whole Foods will be among the small number of companies that first launch when the loyalty card support goes live this fall alongside iOS 9 and the renamed Passbook app now known as ‘Wallet’, 9to5Mac has learned.
The adoption of loyalty cards through Apple Pay will likely be slower than credit and payment cards as NFC terminal makers, such as Verifone, have to enable each program on a case by case basis, according to sources close to the situation. That likely means that you can expect the roll out of the loyalty/rewards programs through Apple Pay to be much slower than the addition of new retailers and card issuers supporting the platform.
Earlier today Verifone announced that it would be first to support the loyalty cards through its NFC terminals starting with six retailers. While it didn’t mention companies by name, 9to5Mac has now learned those companies will include Dunkin’ Donuts, JCPenney, Kohl’s, Panera, Wegman’s, and Whole Foods. The last company on that list, Whole Foods, is the only major retailer Apple didn’t include in its own announcement on Monday.
The full list from Apple’s press release included Walgreens Balance Rewards, Kohl’s Yes2You Reward program, Coca-Cola, Dunkin’ Donuts, Panera Bread, Wegmans Food Markets, BJ’s Wholesale Club, and JCPenney.
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I’m still trying to figure out how this is going to work at stores that give discounted prices based on whether or not a customer has a rewards card. For instance, yesterday at Walgreens my total was $24 before the computer registered my rewards card and $16 after. That’s why I don’t like to pay until I see what the total is. Is it going to be a two-step process, where I tap my reward card at the beginning, then again to pay at the end? Or do I trust that tapping at the end will give me the discount, and the amount processed will be different than what I see on the terminal? That also seems like it will slow down the process since it needs to go through the whole list and look for discounts before it completes the transaction.
From what I read is that when you put your phone near the terminal it will bring up your loyalty card on your phone, then you’d have the cashier scan the card, then after that you would use tap to pay with your phone.
I do not think that this the case. Since Verifone has to enable their terminals to scan loyalty cards with NFC, I think it will work much like Apple Pay itself: once you approach the terminal it will recognize your loyalty card and scan it. One thing I am not sure about is how system will differentiate between credit cards and loyalty cards. My guess is that you will have to manually call your wallet app by say double tapping on home button (iOS 9) and select your loyalty card. By default you will do credit card payment.
It’s clever software the process can be streamlined.
How do you do it today? It will work exactly the same.
Today typically the phone recognizes I’m in Walgreens, and the lock screen gives me the option of opening my Walgreens rewards card from Passbook. I pull that up and the cashier scans it. Then when the items are done being rung up, I tap to ApplePay at the end.
This is one of the coolest features I’ve wanted since I had a Palm Treo.
Maybe I’m missing something here but it sure seems awfully shortsighted for Apple and Verifone to not have at least included the hardware capability when they launched Apple Pay last year. Even if the software wasn’t ready for primetime yet, at least have the hardware infrastructure deployed so when it is ready, it won’t be a repeat of the initial roll out last year where hardware limitations became a limiting factor.
So If a retailer just refreshed all their terminals last year to support Apple Pay, they need to do it again now to have the hardware to accept loyalty cards?
Merchants didn’t refresh their hardware last year. Apple Pay worked with the wireless payment terminals that were already in place. And it’s not like they’re replacing their hardware to support loyalty cards. It’s just firmware updates. The only merchants that have to buy new hardware to support either Apple Pay or NFC loyalty cards are those who didn’t have wireless payment terminals at all.
I wonder if the new Wallet app will let companies not yet using ApplePay store loyalty cards in the app? I kind of hope so just so I don’t have to keep using some other apps like KeyRing or Google Wallet to store them. While I’m wishing, it would be nice if I could manually add loyalty cards that won’t integrate with Passbook now (I’m looking at you Q’Doba). I know there are sites like Passsource that let you add your own cards but I haven’t found it to work very well for me. Overall, I’ve been disappointed with the number of companies that don’t support Passbook and I’ve wondered why they chose not to? I’m guessing it has something to do with how little customer info Apple collects for them?
I take it that the UK will be waiting another year for store card support? 😉