Customers can store any payment method – credit card, debit card, prepaid card or gift card – in the Walmart Pay function within the Walmart app. At checkout, users open the Walmart app, select Walmart Pay and use their camera to scan a QR code on the card reader.
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Walmart Pay will be available on devices using Apple’s (AAPL.O) iOS or Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Android operating system and allows payments with any major credit, debit, pre-paid or Walmart gift cards, the company said.
“The simplicity and ease of Walmart Pay comes not only from how it works, but also in how it’s been built”, said Daniel Eckert, senior vice president, services, Walmart U.S. “We made a strategic decision to design Walmart Pay to work with nearly any smartphone and accept nearly any payment type – even allowing for the integration of other mobile wallets in the future”.
As for Walmart Pay, the retailer said it was the first chain to offer its own payment solution that works with any mobile device.
It would seem a little too good to be true if it was just an app, but Walmart’s foray into the mobile payment wars isn’t like the other payment systems at all.
Wal-Mart global e-commerce CEO Neil Ashe, said that customers are accelerating the use of their smartphones to make purchases on Walmart.com and that Wal-Mart Pay will make that process more seamless. They also said they were excited about being in a pilot program called Merchant Customer Exchange that also includes such retailers as Target. Walmart Pay isn’t meant to override those efforts, Ashe says, and Eckert stresses that the two payment options are “really different solutions”, given CurrentC can be used by multiple retailers.
Using mobile phones for point-of-sale payments should be worth about $27.05 billion in the USA next year, about triple the expected value for 2015, according to eMarketer. Samsung goes further in offering a backup: The phone can mimic the old-school magnetic signals produced by card swipes and work with most existing equipment.
The retail giant is launching Walmart Pay, which lets customers pay for items at the cash register using only their mobile phones, in a few stores in the company’s hometown of Bentonville, Ark.
JPMorgan Chase, meanwhile, is working on its own system for mobile payments.
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Walmart has long supported the MCX coalition of retailers, but the MCX app CurrentC has yet to become readily available, leading many companies to abandon the platform in favor of their own solutions or Apple Pay. When customers arrive at the register, a QR code will pop up at the payment terminal.
