Starbucks, not Apple Pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay, is the most popular mobile payment system in the U.S.
Just because you build it and offer it doesn’t mean consumers will use it. We’ve heard that before and it also applies to mobile payment platforms given that Samsung Pay is the most widely available among Apple Pay (AAPL) and Google Pay (GOOGL), but it’s the least used of the three. The most popular mobile payment platform in the US is from Starbucks, and whlie it’s available on those three platforms, it’s the reason why consumers use it that has made it the domestic stalwart compared to the others.
To order ahead or stand in line at the store and digitally buy Guilty Pleasures (coffee and other snacks as well as food and treats) while racking up rewards under its loyalty program.
Of course, having roughly 14,000 locations does help Starbucks take the crown from the others. But the question we ponder is if Starbucks will pull a page from the Amazon (AMZN) playbook and let third parties utilize its mobile payment system much the way Amazon has done with Amazon Web Services? While profit margins on coffee are favorable, software margins are even better.
By the end of this year, a quarter of U.S. smartphone users — 55 million people — over the age of 14 will make an in-store mobile payment. More than 40 percent of those people will have done so through Starbucks’s mobile payments app, according to new data from research firm eMarketer.
The Starbucks app, which launched before the other three top payments apps — Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay — has long been the most successful payments app. It’s likely going to maintain that lead over the next few years.
The Starbucks app lets users pay with their phones and earn credits toward future purchases. That usage is significant: Starbucks said its mobile order-and-pay system accounted for 12 percent of all U.S. transactions in the quarter ended April 1. By year’s end, Starbucks will have 23.4 million users in the U.S. who have made an in-store mobile payment in the previous six months, according to eMarketer’s estimates. That number is higher than the 14.9 million customers who are part of Starbucks’s rewards program, which only counts monthly active users; customers also don’t have to be rewards members to make purchases using the app.
Apple Pay is accepted at more than half of U.S. merchants, according to eMarketer. Google Pay is less popular despite being preinstalled on Android phones. Samsung is the most widely accepted — about 80 percent of merchants have it, eMarketer estimates — but it’s the least popular.
