I have always wondered why a site like Amazon doesn’t have Apple pay or Google pay support on their payment flow.
Good point. 
Because Amazon Pay is a competitor to those services. They want to be the single checkout, not handover to one.
Or because they want to charge your saved card whenever they feel like.
I have had many instances where kids randomly pressed buttons for the Firestick and I end up being charged for a channel or any whatever purchase including Amazon music. I always get them cancelled but it is a pain. Enabling Amazon video PIN also doesn’t stop them.
What is the market share for Amazon pay by the way? I think I have only seen less than 5 sites offer it as a payment option.
It’s like Tesco’s treatment of Apple Pay. If Tesco could get out of disallowing the wallets without turning off contactless, they would.
They’re too big to need Apple Pay. It’s just less money for them if they offer it.
If this card has 0 FX fees, no charge on foreign currency transactions, I’d go for it. If it was literally anyone other than Amazon, and supported Apple Pay. So I’ll be sticking with my standard rewards card for now.
Not too high. It appears here and there.
I’ll bite. What do you base this upon?
AIUI Tesco choose to fix the upper cap of their contactless card limits because of issues with walkaways/inadverted shoplifting when a higher cap was trialled (i.e. people tapping the card then leaving the shop, even though the terminal instructed them to insert their card/enter their PIN). This is a huge issue in self-service retail settings. Other supermarkets are implementing turnstiles at checkouts which require a receipt to be scanned to avoid the same thing.
NFC payment providers take their cut from interchange fees; the cost to the merchant is the same as any other contactless payment on the same card (and typically capped according to the interchange fee cap).
For pretty much the same treatment of it you outline there. I just don’t buy their justification behind it because of the much more potent monopolistic anti consumer reasons there are for how they handle it.
It costs more when mobile wallets are used over just the card (something like an extra 0.5p extra per £100), and they have a competing system they want people to sign up for. Good logical justifications for treating the mobile wallets as second class citizens relative to their own proprietary thing that only works in Tesco.
They can’t not accept Apple Pay without also not accepting contactless, and I believe the prevalence of contactless is the only reason they accepted Apple Pay at all.
Their own competing system never suffered the same limitations, and smaller supermarkets never discriminated against Apple Pay in the same way.
They only ever remedied it (and even then not completely) when it became a particular sore point during covid, where contactless solutions like Apple Pay were being heavily touted over plastic and cash, and it was whipping up quite the negative PR storm for them. The limit was so low people couldn’t do their weekly shopping without either putting their card into the machine, paying with cash, or using Tesco’s own QR thingy.
This is where your argument falls apart I’m afraid. That cost is absorbed by the issuer, not the merchant in ‘card present’ situations.
This differs from the online checkout flow, where the cost is absorbed by the merchant (hence cards which don’t support Google Pay in person use working without issue on online checkout flows).
PayQwiq was implemented when the contactless limit was still £20… one of the reasons it existed was to provide an app-based method for people to pay with their shopping when these things were still in their infancy.
It’s also all but gone now, I very much doubt Barclays will see any value in continuing with it.
There’s no “discrimination” against Apple Pay, they’re supported up to £100 as with any other form of contactless payment. That’s equality, if anything, surely?
No.
Apple Pay brings additional security protections, over contactless which has none. It’s stronger even than chip and pin, and ought to be treated as such. Comparing it to contactless limits is a red herring. We should be comparing to chip and pin. (most) Banks place no limit on Apple Pay for a reason and merchants should respect that.
Apple Pay predates PayQwik by 2 whole years, and has never been subject to the contactless limit. If anything that just reinforces the idea that Tesco restricted it in order to build and favour their own solution. Barclays tried to do the same, but caved much sooner.
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Apple Pay may not have had a limit of their own, but merchants most certainly did. In fact the business I worked for at rented a terminal (from Cardnet) which was hardcoded to prompt the user to insert their card at £20 then £30 when it was increased.
It’s absolutely right that merchants get to choose the limits they are comfortable with. Apple aren’t picking up the bill when customers tap their card and walk away.
False equivalence.
Tesco as a retailer sought a solution which allowed them to speed up transactions, bundle in Clubcard and allow payment with any card and almost any smartphone (in an era when many issuers were still not Apple/Android Pay enabled, many phones did not come with wallet support and in fact many phones still didn’t even run iOS or Android!).
It also significantly mitigated the risk of walk aways - since the only scope for them would be in the case of declines rather than declines + PIN checks.
They never blocked Apple nor Google Pay (in fact they were the very first supermarket chain to offer contactless of any sort, Sainsburys still didn’t until 2017!).
Barclays by contrast added no additional value with their own offer and did completely block Google Pay until very recently in an attempt to force users to use it.
Not everything is an anti-consumer conspiracy, there is such a thing as companies genuinely trying to be innovative and offer better solutions to improve the customer journey. Sometime things run their course and Tesco’s solution is clearly at the end of that trail.
Oh, I agree. Not everything is an anti-consumer conspiracy, but I steadfast believe that to be the case with Tesco. Their track record speaks for itself IMO.
If you have to artificially restrict your competitors solutions relative to your own though, which is what they did (regardless of if that was indeed the intent or not), however you try to justify it, is not a customer friendly thing to do. Nor is it something you need to do if yours is truly the better and more innovative solution. But you’re only the second person I’ve come across after @Recchan who might actually think that about the QR solutions. 
Barclays on the other hand, I really liked. What they were doing was in fact innovative, and better (imo) than other solutions in market at the time. The problem is the mobile wallet solutions completely supplanted their efforts, doing the job better, and more securely. I do miss the little phone NFC sticker and key fob though.
On the rest we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Fascinating stuff, this. A subject of which I’m truly ignorant.
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Indeed. Do you want to move this stuff out so we can continue to discuss it without continuing to take the thread off topic please?
I’ve shifted it to a new thread. Feel free to update the title if you have one better suited.
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Not what I said, at all.
It’s good to learn. Not too happy to see the Barclaycard Amazon not accept Apple Pay.
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Based on some posts on Monzo Community today there is no Apple Pay limit any more. Your stern letter-writing campaign must have done the trick @N26throwaway .
Yes, I said above:
I believe it shares the same limit as their own solution now. £250 IIRC.
For the record QR solutions are standardised here so literally every one will work!
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In China, sure, I get it. They’re not new solutions and eastern countries have widely adopted and used that tech for decades that it’s as ubiquitous as cash.
In the west though, they came about as a response to mobile wallets, and wanting to control that process for themselves in the only way they really could. Which is why I believe it’s more about control than offering the very best experience. So we don’t have that same standardised interoperable solution to make it a compelling choice.