Retailers take huge risk by banning Apple Pay

CVS, Rite Aid and other retail chains have what they consider to be good reasons for banning Apple Pay

Whereas Apple is trying to make things easier for shoppers by letting them pay using their iPhones through the Apple Pay method, the retail stores are making it difficult for the company to implement this decision. As Apple continues to struggle with its new payment method, two major drugstore chains have already announced a ban for the technology. CVS, Rite Aid and some other chains think that they have their reasonable factors for not accepting this new payment method. The main thing is that they simply want customers to use their own mobile payment system because it will cost them less.

At the same time, such retail stores are also taking a huge risk which can possibly have some worrying effects if suffer security breaches like the ones their fellow retailers did last holiday season. Their logical arguments don’t seem to be that logical after all and the mobile payment system which they are backing, called CurrrentC, isn’t going to launch up till the next year and so their customers will not have any new options apart from the same old clone-friendly credit cards they’re using now.

As opposed to the credit cards, Apple Pay offers much more security. It is easier for the cards to get hacked like they did last year at Target, Home Depot and Michaels and once they do, things really do get ugly for the retail chains. Apple Pay’s security measures ensure that no such mishap takes place and this is beneficial for both the retail stores as well as the customers. With this new payment method by Apple, every customer would himself authenticate the purchase by giving in a fingerprint on the home button of the iPhone which is kind of like a fingerprint identification device. This process requires completion before the payment information is sent to a merchant’s checkout system.

This information which has been transmitted isn’t the actual card information of the shopper, instead it is a stand-in code known as a “token” which then has to make its way through the payment network where it isn’t matched up with a shopper’s actual credit card account until it reaches a virtual vault secured by either the card network or the bank that issued the card. This is the safest way for any customer to make a purchase because this way the merchant is never going to have the confidential financial information which is provided when customers pay through their cards.

source: recode