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Apple Pay Rewards Program to Debut at WWDC

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Apr 12, 2001
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Apple plans to introduce a new rewards program for Apple Pay at WWDC next month, reports The New York Times. In a piece covering upcoming mobile payment upgrades from Apple and Google, the site suggests that Apple will announce details about enhancements to Apple Pay at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Few details are known about the rewards program that Apple plans to implement, but it is said to offer "perks" to customers who make purchases using Apple Pay.
But analysts have noted that a missing piece from Apple Pay was a rewards program to keep users returning to participating merchants. People familiar with Apple Pay said that next month, Apple will announce such a program offering perks to consumers who make purchases with the service, though they declined to reveal details.
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There have been rumors about a rewards program for Apple Pay since before Apple Pay launched in October of 2014. In September, a report suggested Apple was working on a pilot program that could see it partnering with multiple third-party retailers to form an Apple Pay loyalty program.

Further rumors suggested the system could tie into iAd, delivering targeted ads to consumers via iBeacons and Bluetooth LE with coupons for free or discounted products, but it is not clear if that's how Apple's finished rewards program will work.

Upcoming Apple Pay competitor CurrentC offers a built-in rewards program that's able to incorporate loyalty cards and discounts for individual merchants, and CurrentC executives tout this as one of the major differentiating features of its system. With its own rewards program, Apple Pay will be better situated to compete with the reward-based features of CurrentC.

It is not known if Apple has plans to introduce additional Apple Pay features at its Worldwide Developers Conference, but it's possible that it could share details on an expansion of the service to additional countries like Canada. Canada is expected to be one of the first countries beyond the United States to gain Apple Pay support.

Article Link: Apple Pay Rewards Program to Debut at WWDC
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/27/apple-pay-rewards-program-wwdc/
And if only it would come to Australia! Every store I have been to for the past few years all have contactless now. Would actually be a little strange if they didn't have it to be honest! The technology is there...come on Apple, we is hungry for Apple Pay
 
CurrentC is DOA as it is.

With Target going to Apple Pay it pretty much leaves it as a Walmart only operation. Game is over
 
Interesting, I've had Apple Pay fo over 5 months but have yet to use it. If it would cover my 20g/mo iCloud charge (0.99/mo x 2 lines) I might be more inclined to try it out.
 
Suffice to say, Apple Pay is a bust.

(Thanks to non-compliant and greedy retailers.)
 
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bmunge said:
I use it every day. It works on the vending machines where I work and I can use my Apple Watch with my phone charging on my desk. It's pretty awesome in my experience.
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Congrats, but you unfortunately are one of the few actually using Apple Pay. Wish I had vending machines (I'm hungry).
 
Apple does have a loyalty app. It's called Passport. Loyalty cards reside there, and are used from there. It does work well, but it's a separate app, and so, in conjunction with Apple Pay, it can be clumsy.

If Apple integrates this so that the cards are recognized as Apple Pay is being used, automatically, that would make this very easy to use.

Get the one from Walgreens from the App Store, and check it out.
 
melgross said:
Apple does have a loyalty app. It's called Passport. Loyalty cards reside there, and are used from there. It does work well, but it's a separate app, and so, in conjunction with Apple Pay, it can be clumsy.
Click to expand...

Passbook has next to no developer support though. I'm not sure about in the US, but in NZ there are no Passbook apps in the App Store (well, there's one, HungryHero, but it doesn't actually work in NZ).
 
I see Google just announced it Android Pay which is basically a copy of Apple Pay according to the NYT.
 
Col4bin said:
Suffice to say, Apple Pay is a bust.

(Thanks to non-compliant and greedy retailers.)
Click to expand...

No it's not. Look, there are between 12-15 million points of sale in the USA. When the iPhone 6, and Apple Pay first came out, only 220 thousand had NFC terminals. Earlier this month, during the financial call, Cook stated that the number was up to 700 thousand. That's a pretty big jump.

By the end of the year, it's expected to be at 1.2 million, maybe more. It will take years before the transition is mostly done, and there will always be small businesses in out of the way places that won't accept it, until it's well used everywhere else.

So sure, we can call what Walmart is doing greed, if making more profit. And cutting out the middleman is considered to be greed.

But look, to be fair, a company's loyalty is to itself. It's supposed to come up with ways to maximize profits. So I have nothing against what they are doing. We can see that companies affiliated with the program are allowed to also accept other payment systems after a certain time, and that time seems to have come up for a number of Current C members.

So nothing lost.
 
Over here in Britain we have a few but not US numbers. You can get Starbucks (I never go so don't use) Subway (I do have) and certain airlines. I'm on holiday at the moment and used it for my flight out. I flew with Ryanair, a company well known for doing everything in there power to cut back on non-necessities (you know those holders you get under your tray table that has magazines and stuff in it? They removed them. Not just didn't install, removed!) so was shocked to see they had a app and I could use passbooks, which was fun in airport!

Unfortunately, I'm flying with a different cheap as chips airline on the way back and they do not support it at this time. Alas!

P.s. Don't know why I shared all this with you. It's 2:15am here and I'm just out to ramble!

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Nermal said:
Passbook has next to no developer support though. I'm not sure about in the US, but in NZ there are no Passbook apps in the App Store (well, there's one, HungryHero, but it doesn't actually work in NZ).
Click to expand...

Over here in Britain we have a few but not US numbers. You can get Starbucks (I never go so don't use) Subway (I do have) and certain airlines. I'm on holiday at the moment and used it for my flight out. I flew with Ryanair, a company well known for doing everything in there power to cut back on non-necessities (you know those holders you get under your tray table that has magazines and stuff in it? They removed them. Not just didn't install, removed!) so was shocked to see they had a app and I could use passbooks, which was fun in airport!

Unfortunately, I'm flying with a different cheap as chips airline on the way back and they do not support it at this time. Alas!

P.s. Don't know why I shared all this with you. It's 2:15am here and I'm just out to ramble!
 
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1) From a UK perspective (and everywhere else non-US, for that matter):
Can we just AT LEAST have the vanilla APay please Apple.

2) Rewards idea:
NO MORE LOYALTY CARD CASH PRELOADING.

Walk into Starbucks, open APay on phone, pay FROM MY BANK ACCOUNT (or any other credit/debit card I choose on the fly) with a receipt (optionally) emailed to me, and simply loyalty points get added to my Starbucks account. The end.

This is instead of having to keep loading separate lumps of cash onto the bloody Starbucks card periodically: a pain in the neck! If we have to do that for every loyalty card one might use, effectively we have piles of our own unspent cash spread across all these companies accounts, nicely earning THEM interest and NOT us. And not being able to use cash in one place for another use, either. Sucky.

Thanks Apple for doing this... you ARE doing this, aren't you Apple...? :rolleyes:
 
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Nermal said:
Passbook has next to no developer support though. I'm not sure about in the US, but in NZ there are no Passbook apps in the App Store (well, there's one, HungryHero, but it doesn't actually work in NZ).
Click to expand...

I can't speak to support, particularly outside of the States, but it does exist, and seems to work just fine, it's interesting though, before Apple Pay, it seemed to be real easy to use, and the apps themselves allow a setup that covers a lot of things, particularly for Walgreens.

But once you use Apple Pay, you realize that now you've got to use two apps for this, and it's just easier to type your phone number in the terminal before you pay with Apple Pay, to get the advantage of the loyalty program, which, as a result, cuts Passport out of the picture, except that the Walgreens app, and others, do know what you've bought, after the fact, and whatever discount, points, or whatever you've received. So it's not entirely useless.

In addition, the Starbucks app resides there as well. When I'm near a Starbucks, that fact appears on the phone screen, and I can pay with it by them scanning the screen.

Lastly, the airlines that use smartphone ticketing, use Passport. I've used that several times. Works pretty well too.
 
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