Walmart Pay Launches, Allows Customers to Checkout With Mobile Devices

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., announced Wednesday that it is testing a mobile payment system, titled “Walmart Pay”, that will allow shoppers to use their smartphone to pay for products inside their shopping cart at checkout.

Walmart has over 140 million customers who shop weekly, according to the company’s CEO of global e-commerce Neil Ashe. Once you’ve got the app, you can use any major credit, debit, or prepaid card or a Walmart gift card to pay for your goods. The retail giant launched Walmart Pay service, which it expects to roll out across the United States by the middle of 2016.

It will be introduced at a small number of U.S. stores later this month and rolled out next year across the United States.

Done: The sales associate scans and bags the items … and it’s done.

Initially, exclusivity agreements within MCX meant some retailers were more receptive to accepting Apple Pay than others at its launch.

Walmart’s decision to add payment functionality to its app is the latest development in the rapidly evolving mobile payments landscape where brands such as Apple, Samsung, Visa offer solutions and a retail consortium MXC has introduced an app called CurrentC.

The world’s largest retailer was also dissatisfied with other mobile wallets available.

What we’re waiting to see is if Walmart Pay will emerge as Asda Pay in the United Kingdom (somewhat doubtful, we know that United Kingdom banking regulations are very different to the USA so compliance costs would be high).

Wal-Mart is expanding its mobile app to enable customers to pay via smartphone.

Walmart customers can set their feature to prioritize the payments using for example only gift cards with say a credit card as a second payment choice. “The other solutions are limited to only certain types of phones, operating systems, or certain payment types-and sometimes all three of those”, said Daniel Eckert, SVP Services for Walmart U.S. About 22 million customers use the Wal-Mart app each month, and more than half of Wal-Mart’s online orders are now coming from mobile devices.

Though Walmart Pay also uses QR codes, a Walmart representative tells Mashable its payments technology was developed by the company independently.

At any register, open the Walmart app, choose Walmart Pay and activate the phone’s camera.

Walmart is working with mobile wallet developers to implement more payment options in the future.