First – What is Apple Pay?
Apple Pay is a contactless payment method built into Apple devices. It is designed to completely replace physical credit and debit cards. Because you can store your card information inside of your Apple Wallet, you can still use those accounts to make purchases. Instead of hunting through a wallet for the right card, and then swiping it or inserting it into the payment terminal, customers can simply use their Apple device and connect to the terminal wirelessly.
Apple Pay also features a service called Apple Pay Cash. Cash is similar to Paypal. Using the system, you can send and receive money from friends quickly and easily. You can also load money into your Apple Pay Cash account and use that balance to pay for goods and services in stores or online. This makes it ideal for giving your older children allowances, or even for keeping yourself on a more strict budget.
Now that you have an idea of what Apple Pay can do for consumers, let’s talk about some of the things that make it an attractive option for sports and fitness businesses. Aside from the growing popularity of the technology, there are a few advantages that it offers over traditional cards.
3 Reasons You Should Accept Apple Pay At Your Sports & Fitness Business
Highly secure form of payment
Apple Pay offers a significantly more secure method of payment than plastic cards do. For starters, if you lose your credit card, anyone who picks it up can go out and start swiping without much problem. Banks will usually cover you in the case of fraud such as that, but the whole ordeal will be a hassle and potentially embarrassing. Apple Pay does away with those concerns. Even if somebody steals your phone, the app will require a fingerprint, face ID, or password before they can make a payment, so your finances are still secure. The advantage of that to business owners is that you have increased assurance that a payment coming from the Apple Pay service will not be fraudulent.
The security features don’t stop there. Apple Pay compatible devices have a built-in chip that will generate a unique transaction code for every single purchase that a customer makes. This means that your customer’s credit or debit card information is never visible to snooping eyes. Your customers needn’t fear card skimmers or other electronic devices that may read their card information without them knowing it. The added peace of mind that Apple Pay provides customers has made it very popular. Allowing your clients to take advantage of that peace of mind will result in happier clients. And as you know, happier clients are always something that businesses benefit from.
Privacy
I mentioned a bit about how the device will generate a unique transaction ID in the previous section, but Apple takes your customer’s privacy seriously and has several other layers to protect their data. In fact, they created a separate subsidiary company to handle all of the transactions so the parent company doesn’t even have access to the data. Even that specially created company has access to very little information. Apple stores some generic information, but nothing specific about your purchases and not identifying information is stored by the company.
In addition to that, when you add a card to your Apple Pay account, the device does not store the card number. Instead, a special device number is created by the card’s issuer and that is stored on the device instead. This number cannot be used by any method other than Apple Pay. It doesn’t stop there though, because not even the device’s operating system can access that number. It is handled exclusively by a special hardware chip called the Security Element.
Simplicity
I’ve talked a bit about how Apple Pay makes it easy to pay without fumbling through a wallet for a credit or debit card. But it makes life so much easier on even more fronts. In addition to having all of their payment methods stored in an easy to access way right on their phone, your customers will also have a transaction history stored on the phone. This allows them to quickly access and refer to all of the payments they’ve made, not just at your facility, but at all businesses that take Apple Pay. This will simplify their record keeping.
Apple Pay simplifies things for you as well. For example, you can connect your rewards card to Apple Pay. After doing so, the customer can set the app to automatically present the rewards card upon payment. Along with the already quicker payment process, this can really help streamline your register during busy times of the day. Of course, like everything else in the system, Apple will keep your client’s rewards card usage private. The only people who will know about their usage are you and them.
Best of all, it is very easy for you to begin taking Apple Pay payments. In fact, if you already have a payment terminal capable of accepting NFC payments then it may be as simple as calling your provider and asking them to enable it. Chances are very high that your terminal does accept NFC payments because most terminals that work with EMV chips do. Since credit and debit cards switched to EMV chips a few years ago, most businesses have upgraded their terminals to accept them.
Conclusion
Whether you run a gym, and equipment store, or something in between, your sports and fitness business can benefit from using Apple Pay. As a business, you’ll not only attract new clients that look specifically for Apple Pay support when choosing a business, but you’ll also provide a solid set of features to your existing customer base and to yourself. Just as society moved from cash to plastic, the switch to contactless payments has begun and you’ll want to reap the benefits of being an early adopter. As many people enjoy the best credit card to build credit or something similar to enjoy the services, you owe it to them to facilitate new payment methods.
Once set up to take Apple Pay, be sure to go to the Apple website and add yourself to Apple Maps as an Apple Pay supporting business and order the Apple Pay sticker for your window so you can let all of your customers know about your new payment option.
