Walmart To Finally Start Accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay (techcrunch.com) 70
After years of refusing to adopt tap-to-pay technology in its stores, retail giant Walmart announced today that it is finally accepting payments via both Apple Pay and Google Pay. The rollout begins August 24 at select Walmart and Sam's Club locations and is expected to reach all stores by year-end. It will then expand to fuel stations by mid-2027. TechCrunch reports: The news is a surprise, as Walmart has long refused to adopt the ubiquitous payment technology to instead promote its own in-house solutions, like Walmart Pay and Scan-and-Go. In years past, Walmart even teamed up with other big retailers in an attempt to take down Apple Pay entirely with an alternative mobile payment system of their own, called CurrentC. The effort failed and was shut down back in 2016.
All the while, Walmart customers have begged the company to support modern tap-and-pay technology, like Apple Pay, which is now accepted at 85% of retailers across the U.S., including most larger stores.
For Walmart, the decision reads as a defeat. As one of the world's largest retailers, it believed it could push customers to its own payment solutions despite the growing adoption of Apple Pay and others of its kind. Ultimately, it had to admit that it was disadvantaging its own customers in the process.
All the while, Walmart customers have begged the company to support modern tap-and-pay technology, like Apple Pay, which is now accepted at 85% of retailers across the U.S., including most larger stores.
For Walmart, the decision reads as a defeat. As one of the world's largest retailers, it believed it could push customers to its own payment solutions despite the growing adoption of Apple Pay and others of its kind. Ultimately, it had to admit that it was disadvantaging its own customers in the process.
Better late than never (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Better late than never (Score:1)
I'm not sure I like the idea of Google, never mind Apple (or even worse, Samsung) skimming off the top of every single purchase I make. And in this case, even if they don't, even the cash purchases inevitably take a hit, effectively subsidizing these companies where they're not even involved.
We're literally adding yet another payment middle man in a place where we already have several. Anybody who has ever had a credit card merchant account will understand what I'm talking about.
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I'm not sure I like the idea of Google, never mind Apple (or even worse, Samsung) skimming off the top of every single purchase I make.
On the other hand, the fraud losses are a lot lower, and as far as I know the transaction fee is the same, and the credit card company pays the 0.15% fee out of their cut. So while it theoretically *could* eventually drive up the rate in the future, I don't think that's happening currently.
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I'm not sure I like the idea of Google, never mind Apple (or even worse, Samsung) skimming off the top of every single purchase I make.
On the other hand, the fraud losses are a lot lower, and as far as I know the transaction fee is the same, and the credit card company pays the 0.15% fee out of their cut. So while it theoretically *could* eventually drive up the rate in the future, I don't think that's happening currently.
Yeah the best thing about Google Pay is the merchants never see your real credit card number, they get one managed by Google. If someone wants to try and do sketchy things with that, have at it.
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the credit card company pays the 0.15% fee out of their cut
For now.
Can't you already pay with the app? (Score:2)
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>"They SUCK in my area...mediocre prices and every store is a horror show of damaged shitty merchandise thrown all over the place, flicking lights, and poorly maintained everything."
My nearest Walmart, which I frequent, has on-part or lower prices on most goods than anywhere else, and it really not dirty or overly disorganized. And no problems with lighting. My problems are:
1) They are *ALWAYS* out of SOMETHING I need. Often it is several items on my list. And often it is something basic like eggs, d
Re:Can't you already pay with the app? (Score:4)
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>"They should have always been limited to 10-15 items. No more than you can carry in a hand basket. It's infuriating when you have 1 or a couple items and you're stuck waiting behind someone who's purchasing a heaping cart full prepping for the apocalypse"
[My Walmart is 15 items] And it is also infuriating when you have 16 to 30 items and are stuck in a GLACIAL line with people who have 50 to 100 items. AND then muck around with their stupid phones AND multiple payment methods at the end AND with reade
Not in NYC, BOS, CHI, LA (Score:2)
It's well-known. WalMart won't tou
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3) They never have enough checkout lanes open, so are always INCREDIBLY slow.
Between our local stores, I have checkout issues are Target FAR MORE than I do at Walmart. My biggest issue at one of our Walmarts is that I always prefer self-checkout but they sometimes only open one set of 4 kiosks, which generates a line of 4-5 people at a time. I'm sure there are registers open somewhere, but I'll take a minute or two of pain over wandering to find an open staffed register most days.
Our Target is a complete clusterfuck for checkout (and it's not even a big city or anything). There are
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I prefer self-checkout, if the self-checkout is done correctly, but often have "too many items" to use it. Ultimately, I don't care if it is self-checkout or not. I just want to get the F out of the store without waiting forever.
My Target is always TREMENDOUSLY faster than my Walmart. Always. Target has many more open checkouts and with fewer people in each, and moves much faster. They have fewer self-checkouts than Walmart, but at Walmart, there is often a queue 10+ deep just to get into the self-chec
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1) They are *ALWAYS* out of SOMETHING I need.
I'm convinced this is just because of bad logistics. I've got three Walmarts in relatively close proximity and often two will be completely out of something, while the third will have an absolute shitload of it. My guess would be that the stock intended to be split between the other nearby stores just gets all dumped at one location by their freight unloaders, and they call it a night.
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Uhm my drivers license is also on my phone.
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Yes, you can use their app to pay. It sucks though.
For one, my watch can tap to pay, but not with walmart app.
For walmart, I have to open the app, wait for it to load, sometimes it randomly decides I need to "prove I'm a human", then as I'm trying to go to pay, it pops up a "you want walmart+ now!" and the "yes" button is close to where I would have tapped so I can imagine they get accidental accepts. Then finally I click and it opens the camera app to scan the qr code, which is an annoying approach in ge
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Aren't these redundant since you can pay with their app?
Why would I want to give them even more data? Apps are known for slurping up as much as they can get from you as possible. I don't want them to have that.
All I wanted was them to support Tap to Pay for regular credit cards. Let go of the swiping already. They're one of the last holdouts that doesn't support it and it's crazy.
American issue, not Walmart specific (Score:2)
I believe apple pay has been available in Walmart Canadian stores for a long time. Tap to pay is pretty much everywhere.
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Tap-to-pay (aka Interac Flash) has been available in Canadian Wal-Mart stores for over a decade. Whether that's done via a debit/credit card, Google Wallet, Samsung Wallet, or Apple Wallet is irrelevant as they all use the same tech.
Once again, the backwater known as the US banking industry is decades behind the rest of the world.
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Tap-to-pay (aka Interac Flash) has been available in Canadian Wal-Mart stores for over a decade.
NFC payments, like Apple Pay and Google Pay, have been available in many US stores for well over a decade as well. The reported issue was indeed due to a specific decision made by Walmart.
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Your subject line, "American issue, not Walmart specific", is completely wrong.
I've been able to use Apple Pay / NFC payments here in America for a long time at a lot of stores - my local hardware store, my pharmacy, both of my local grocery stores. But some specific stores - Walmart and Home Depot come to mind - made a deliberate choice (in the U.S. at least) to try and push their own payment "app" rather than adopt the standard NFC payment system. The main driver for this appears to have been they did not
lets not forget (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's not banker greed. It's government greed. UPI is run by the government.
They were never going to win this one (Score:5, Insightful)
You could use ApplePay everywhere but Walmart, or you could use "WalmartPay" at walmart and only walmart. There was zero incentive to set that up when you could just dig out the physical card if you happened to find yourself in a walmart.
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Your bank is most likely running decades old proprietary code from the most proprietary company of all, IBM.
Not a FOSS answer but ... (Score:2)
... if you're just trying to reduce or eliminate the Mountain View Monster from your life then Samsung Pay is the non Apple/Google solution I'm aware of in the USA. But I've yet to see a Samsung phone stripped of all Google tech. Certainly not FOSS. I don't think there's a FOSS "NFC Wallet" app there yet.
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I've never seen a NFC payment app on F-Droid.
There's no such thing as a NFC payment app. There's a bank payment app, Apple is acting like a bank. Google is acting like a bank. No one here is storing credit cards on their phone so you won't ever see an "open source NFC payment app".
Obviously I'm not going to trust my banking information to any proprietary software.
The proprietary software is literally that of your bank's. If you don't trust their software I suggest you empty your bank account and stuff cash in pillowcases.
Is there a way to tap to pay with an Android phone that doesn't have any Google apps on it?
Yes. If your bank supports it. It used to be that my bank's own app ran the NFC payment. These days they outsource
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Samsung Pay doesn't involve Samsung acting as a bank. They only act as an intermediary for storing "virtual payment cards" in the security module on your phone. There's some standard interface between Samsung's servers and the financial institutions to facilitate adding cards and sending transaction notifications to the phones. I though Apple Pay could work the same way. It wouldn't surprise me if Google Wallet requires the payment to actually go through them, since they want to put their noses in every
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Correct, I completely dumbed it down to the point where my point was lost. My point was that these apps aren't just apps. The companies who write them act as payment processors that have to follow complex international regulations and interact with banking systems in regulated ways. Either way the "proprietary software" is no less trustworthy than that of your bank (and often your banking app is required on the device to register your virtual payment card in the first place), and an open source solution can
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I've never seen a NFC payment app on F-Droid.
There's no such thing as a NFC payment app. There's a bank payment app, Apple is acting like a bank. Google is acting like a bank. No one here is storing credit cards on their phone so you won't ever see an "open source NFC payment app".
You are fundamentally misunderstanding how these things work.
Google Wallet (in this case) gets a "Authorization Token" from your bank (which is stored in encrypted storage on the phone), and uses that to generate a one-time short-term Payment token to give out over NFC to a payment terminal when requested by the authenticated user. In my case, my bank sent me a notification asking to confirm I wanted to add my card to a Google Wallet when I enrolled the card, but after that I just unlock my phone, double-ta
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I think I just used too dumbed down of a phrase. Google wallet is just a place to hold virtual cards. Google Pay is not, that's them acting as an bank, or rather not as a bank (that was me using a mistaken term) but as a payment processor.
Either way in any scenario you're entrusting the payment process to someone who is either covered by banking regulations or regional and global payment processing regulations. There's actual infrastructure involved. There's actual complex interactions with banking systems
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Right, but OP was talking about an Open-Source version of an NFC payment app, like Google Wallet, Samsung Pay or Apple Pay, not a banking app like Google Pay, Paypal or similar.
I believe it would probably be possible to make a FOSS version of an NFC-enabled payment app, but it would also require banks to approve their 'cards' being used/stored in such an app, with some kind of owner of the app the banks could sue for damages if there was a breach or leak of some description. With the big players, if there's
Don't confuse "tap to pay" (Score:5, Insightful)
>"After years of refusing to adopt tap-to-pay technology in its stores, retail giant Walmart announced today that it is finally accepting payments via both Apple Pay and Google Pay. "
The definition of "tap to pay" is not Google Pay and Apple Pay (or Samsung Pay or whatever). It is touching the reader with ANY device, including a physical credit card, and have it contactlessly and quickly completing the transaction.
All the Walmarts around here don't allow you to "tap to pay" with anything; INCLUDING real physical credit cards. You have to insert the card and stand there, waiting, and waiting, and waiting. And in my case, 25% of the time, it fails and I have to try again. Every other merchant I can think of uses tap to pay with cards, except Walmart. And I don't believe that ability would cost more than inserting the same exact card into a reader.
https://www.savingadvice.com/a... [savingadvice.com]
The consensus seems to be that Walmart just wants to make using credit cards as inconvenient as realistically possible, in the hopes customers will just use their app or whatever.
Contactless credit card payments (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this mean they will finally enable contactless credit cards on their POS terminals? They've refused to do it for years, requiring people to insert the chip into the reader, as an attempt to push people into using the Walmart app for payments.
Drives me fucking insane. Half the terminals have screwed up chip contacts in them requiring gymnastics to get it to read the chip and it's so much slower than contactless processing. I've started intentionally failing the chip read twice so I can just swipe my card instead. Pretty sure it costs Walmart extra processing fees and is actually faster.
Contactless credit card payments at Walmart (Score:5, Interesting)
The backstory. Walmart refuses to accept contactless payments because contactless payments are more secure, and your name and credit card info does not show up to be harvested when you use a contactless payment. They want your name an credit card info for their mountain of data they harvest.
If any group tried to lobby congress to phase out contact payments and instead require contactless payments, Walmart's lobbyists would be on members of Congress riding them hard to kill such a bill.
If they eventually did lose access to your name and card number, they'd probably raise prices to cover the savings they saw by harvesting the data.
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Oh and one more thing. Walmart could pull a "Winco Foods" and not accept Credit Card payments at all. In my area there's a Winco Foods about 30 miles from where I live. They only take debit cards, not credit cards. They do beat Walmart's prices so whenever I'm nearby, I take advantage of that.
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Our local Winco - where we buy the majority of our groceries - recently (finally!) installed new POS terminals that allow tap to pay, Apple Pay, etc. It's still debit-only, but that's fine.
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Yes they could, but they'd lose out on a lot of money. Winco foods likely saw their average receipt size and realized most of their patrons could either do debit or cash. Being a grocery store, cash is likely a viable
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They want your name an credit card info for their mountain of data they harvest.
I hadn't even thought about this but now their resistance to enabling contactless or allowing other payment apps makes a lot more sense. Scumbags.
Walmart could pull a "Winco Foods" and not accept Credit Card payments at all.
I like WinCo and shop there when I can (also far enough away to be a special trip). The stores sometimes have a K-Mart feel to them (poor upkeep, minimal customer support, that kind of thing) but they are very often cheaper and carry less popular products, and their deli and bulk foods offer a lot of unique stuff. Produce is usually better than Walmart but less
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Oh and one more thing. Walmart could pull a "Winco Foods" and not accept Credit Card payments at all. In my area there's a Winco Foods about 30 miles from where I live. They only take debit cards, not credit cards. They do beat Walmart's prices so whenever I'm nearby, I take advantage of that.
This is what I love about Winco not putting up with bullshit. Any store that still accepts credit should at least charge transaction fees for using it. Credit has gotten a free ride on all of our backs for long enough.
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>"The backstory. Walmart refuses to accept contactless payments because [...] your name and credit card info does not show up to be harvested when you use a contactless payment. They want your name an credit card info for their mountain of data they harvest."
https://www.rfidcard.com/nfc-p... [rfidcard.com]
That supports the idea if you use the tap instead of insert on a credit card, the merchant can't know who you are. Is that really true? If so, that is fantastic for privacy. And it would explain resistance to the t
Re: Contactless credit card payments at Walmart (Score:2)
This would be horrifying if you werenâ(TM)t pulling it right out your ass. Walmart doesnâ(TM)t want or need your name, itâ(TM)s useless. More work is needed to anonymize your PII, so itâ(TM)s simply easier to not collect it. Thereâ(TM)s a recent feature in the app that will link your in-store purchases when paid with card to your Walmart account. But this relies on your card pre-existing on the Walmart account first. Use a different card and it doesnâ(TM)t work. Remove your car
Might return to shopping at Walmart (Score:2)
We have a Walmart just 1.2 miles from our house.
It is adjacent to the large local liquor store we frequent.
Used to shop at Walmart for certain items that are much cheaper than Safeway.
Stopped going to Walmart about a year ago as the "we don't tale ApplePay" became just too annoying. While I can save about $10 on a typical visit at Walmart vs Safeway, I was too frustrated.
Someone gets a big payday (Score:2)
Verifone, Ingenico or another payment terminal provider because I highly doubt Walmart has NFC enabled terminals already and they just have to turn them on. New terminals for every US store, RFQs were flying earlier this year I bet.
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lol, dumbass fever strikes again. link me some more google results you stupid fucking retard.
god youre so fucking stupid.
stop being so godamned stupid all the fucking time.
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Next time click your links before spouting but hey, go off queen
Four Way Battle Over Money (Score:3)
I tap to pay all the time! (Score:2)
It's all about the money. (Score:2)
Personally, Walmart finally caved for two reasons:
1) They were starting to lose customers who want to use contactless payments, especially now with new and renewed credit cards or debits cards with the Visa or Mastercard labeling now all offering the ability to pay by "tapping" on a terminal. Walmart's recent earnings report supports this view.
2) Walmart was watching with interest how other contactless payment holdouts like WinCo Foods (western USA supermarket chain), H-E-B Grocery Company (mostly Texas sup