Walmart introduced its mobile payment feature last year, and began to roll out nationally two months ago. Walmart Pay has reached over 30 states, and quite recently New York and California and other heavily populated states.
Walmart Pay is actually quite simple to use, the customer visits any register in the store, takes out his mobile device to scan a QR code and at the end receives an e-receipt. A seemingly efficient and rather effortless transaction. Daniel Eckert, senior vice president, services, Walmart U.S. said that “The simplicity and ease of Walmart Pay comes not only from how it works, but also in how it’s been built.”
Eckert elaborated “We made a strategic decision to design Walmart Pay to work with almost any smartphone and accept almost any payment type – even allowing for the integration of other mobile wallets in the future. The result is an innovation that will make the ease of mobile payments a reality for millions of Americans.”
While some have suggested that Walmart Pay is an attempt compete with payment systems such as Apple Pay or Android Pay, others have noted that Walmart Pay is intended to keep customers in-store instead of opting to shop online at Amazon.
Walmart realizes that if it wants to keep its customers in store, it needs to make the shopping experience as enjoyable and hassle-free as possible. Eckert told Fortune that the design was intended to improve checkout, not just payment.
Another motivation behind Walmart Pay is that there has been an increasing trend that Walmart wants to be a part of. Forrester Research forecasted that in-person mobile payments in the U.S. will go from $3.7 billion last year to $34 billion by the end of 2019.
Walmart Pay has a seeming advantage over Apple Pay and Android Pay for two reasons. 1) Walmart currently does not accept these forms of payment. 2) Walmart uses QR codes, which enable more smartphone users that don’t have the NFC wireless technology.
This is what Walmart Pay looks like:
Despite Walmart’s intentions on improving the customer experience, the company was still hit with much critique from consumers, for not allowing them to use Apple Pay instead.
Since this feature has only recently become available in many states, it’s hard to say as to whether consumers will actually use Walmart Pay as their preferred form of payment, use their old fashioned methods, or simply shop at a store that accepts Apple Pay.