Walmart Launches Mobile Payments Service Called Walmart Pay

In latest news, the retailer has announced today that it is introducing Walmart Pay, its own in-house mobile payment solution. Users are required to open the Walmart app, tap Walmart Pay, and then turn on the camera. Walmart, CVS, RiteAid and others are members of a group called Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), which has been a proponent of its own QR code-based mobile payments technology called CurrentC, which retailers favor because it allows them to avoid credit card processing fees. It also comes several months after Google launched the Android Pay mobile wallet app and Samsung debuted Samsung Pay.

The introduction of this payment system is part of Wal-Mart’s overall mobile strategy aimed at making shopping easier and faster. Payments can be made through any major credit, debit, prepaid or Walmart gift cards. Wal-Mart becomes the first USA retailer to offer a service like this.

Built as an add-on to the retailer’s mobile app, shoppers first link their preferred payment method to their Walmart.com account.

After the code has been scanned, the purchase has been paid for and the checkout is complete.

While Wal-Mart doesn’t accept Apple Pay, Target and Best Buy have started supporting the service. Almost half of Walmart’s online orders over Thanksgiving weekend came from mobile devices, and customers in stores used the app at almost twice the rate they did during the same period previous year, Walmart executives said. An electronic receipt is then stored on the app. For added security, users can opt to used Apple Touch ID for fingerprint enabled safety. Acknowledging the crowded landscape, Eckert said Walmart Pay is designed in a way to work with other solutions and perhaps accelerate what to date has been a tepid pace of consumer adoption. “The result is an innovation that will make the ease of mobile payments a reality for millions of Americans”.

Walmart Pay is available both for Android and iOS, and it’s embedded within the Walmart app that’s been available on both mobile platforms for quite some time.

Walmart says that 140 million customers head into it’s stores every week and around 22 million of these use its app every month, so it’s more than likely these customers will try out Walmart Pay as well.