Best Buy said that their customers can start making their purchases using Apple Pay through their Best Buy App starting today. The company added that they will begin supporting the Apple Pay system in their stores later this year.
Best Buy is a member of the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) group of retailers which had devised an alternative mobile payment scheme that would include rewards offers to shoppers. Apart from Best Buy, other leading participants in the group include Rite-Aid, CVS and Walmart.
"Today's consumers have many different ways to spend their money and we want to give our customers as many options as possible in how they pay for goods and services at Best Buy," said the company in a statement.
Apple CEO, Tim Cook, also announced during the company's earnings conference call on Monday that its Apple Pay system would be supported both in Best Buy stores and in their app.
The announcement is notable in the sense that MCX backs its own CurrentC mobile payment platform. A week following the launch of the Apple Pay system, MCX members CVS and Rite Aid had reportedly stopped accepting in-store payments using Apple Pay.
In a blog post, MCX said that "merchants make their own decisions about what solutions they want to bring to their customers. When merchants choose to work with MCX, they choose to do so exclusively."
Back in September, MCX said that CurrentC was launched in private pilot mode in certain locations. The mobile wallet app eventually started to expand and will conduct regional and national rollouts this year. Customers can also expect to download the mobile wallet app which will become available in both the Apple App Store and Google Play store for free.
Despite the adoption of the Apple Pay system, Best Buy remains an MCX partner and will continue to support CurrentC, according to MCX.
"Best Buy remains a strong MCX partner and supporter of the CurrentC initiative," said Scott Rankin, MCX CEO. "At MCX, our core values stem from the customer. We are of the firm belief that there need to be at least 2-3 major players within the mobile payments ecosystem for it to succeed. "
Within the first three months of Apple Pay's entry into the market, the system had expanded its availability in over 700,000 locations. The latest achievement is the addition of the Discovery card into the Apple Pay system which shall launch later this year. The move makes the credit card company of 61 million card holders as the fourth major U.S. credit card to have partnered with Apple. The other three are American Express, MasterCard and Visa.
Photo: Mike Mozart I Flickr
