Apple Pay's Pay Day: Tap to Pay Is Coming to Walmart and Sam’s Club

When it thinks about customer convenience, Walmart waits 12 years.

When we think about convenience, we think about a lot of things, but making shopping feel simpler and more seamless from start to finish is a big part. And one of the moments where that matters most is at checkout.

Beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.

Source: More Ways to Pay

NB: In January 2020, I wrote

My expectation six years ago was that Apple Pay would be a “$1 billion business” by 2020. This was based on a take rate of 15 basis points ($15/$10,000 in transactional value). Juniper Research, which regularly examines payment transaction markets, now expects that Apple will see global Apple Pay transactions of $686 billion by 2024. 

At that 15 basis point rate it amounts to $1.03 billion. Thus this particular research suggests that I was off by 4 years, making the $1 billion pay day a 10 year target rather than six. 

What's the state of Apple Pay today?

According to various sources, Apple Pay handled $7.6 trillion in transactions in 2025. From that, Apple Pay generated an estimated $5.6 billion in revenue in 2025. ($7.4/$10,000 or 7.4 bp, half of the take rate in 2014) This is a significant increase from $6 trillion in transactions estimated in 2022. My estimate of $1 billion in 2020 seems to have been conservative.

Apple Pay’s user base has surpassed 818 million in 2025. This represents a significant increase from 2022's 507 million users. 65.6 million were users in the US.

Projections are that the user count will climb to 87.5 million users in the US by the end of 2026. Surveys suggest that over 22% of the US population aged 14 and older uses Apple Pay daily.

The service now handles about 10% of all global card transactions, doubling its share from a few years ago. In the US, Apple Pay accounts for roughly 5.6% of all retail sales, including both in-store and digital channels. In the US alone, Apple Pay is expected to facilitate $2.9 trillion in payments, accounting for 32% of all contactless point-of-sale activity. Apple Pay has a 49% mobile payment market share in the US as of 2025. This is double the share of second placed Google Pay.

Notably, 62% of Apple Pay users live in households with an annual income above $100,000.

94% of US retail establishments accept Apple Pay in 2026. This number has reached near-ubiquity in the US, up from 85% in previous years. With WalMart's 12 year delayed acceptance the total will reach even higher. Globally, the service is now available in 95 countries.

Apple now processes more than 14.2% of all online consumer payments. This share is growing rapidly.

As of 2026, more than 11,000 banks worldwide supported Apple Pay. The number doubled from 5,480 in 2020.

Apple Pay accounts for 54% of all US in-store mobile wallet transactions. Apple is dominating this market, with Google Pay and PayPal at around 13% each. 71% of Gen Z mobile wallet users in the US choose Apple Pay first and consider digital wallet as primary payment option. Gen Z currently has an 8.8% usage rate among the total US population, compared to 4% for Millennials and 1.1% for Gen X.

Over $1 billion in fraud was eliminated globally through Apple Pay in 2025.

Why Walmart could not …

accept this reality for 12 years speaks to a peculiar myopia probably rooted in an outdated strategic vision of cost minimization.

Regardless of this, the irony of citing customer convenience as a factor in the decision does not address why it took 12 years of customer punishment to come to the conclusion that what they can't measure (satisfaction) trumps what they can measure (6.4 basis points of take rate.)

I'm sure it wasn't the calculus of customer satisfaction that changed their mind but rather the litany of statistics cited above that suggest they missed out on a behavioral trend and thus incurred loss in brand value.