Apple Pay Arrives in Canada

What arrived yesterday

Apple Pay went live in Canada yesterday. Someone with an American Express card can add it to an iPhone and pay at a shop counter by holding the phone near the card terminal.

For now it works with American Express cards only. Other cards cannot be added to the phone yet.

It needs an iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s or 6s Plus, or an Apple Watch paired with an iPhone. Older iPhones cannot make tap payments at all.

Nothing here needs a new website, app or contract. Whether it works at your counter depends on the terminal you already have and the cards your account already accepts.

What has to be true at the counter

• A terminal that takes tap payments, the kind contactless cards already use.
• An account that accepts American Express, the only card the phones carry here.
• Tap switched on for American Express, not only chip.
• Staff who recognise a phone payment and do not ask for the card.
• One test payment that went through, from a real phone.

The second catches out many small shops. A terminal that takes tapped Visa and Mastercard without complaint will still decline a phone if the account behind it was never set up for American Express.

American Express only, for now

Plenty of small businesses decided years ago not to accept American Express, often because of its fees. That old decision now also decides whether Apple Pay works at the till.

Where the account does not take it, a customer who taps a phone is declined. From their side of the counter, it can look as if the terminal is broken.

Ask your payment processor two things: whether the account accepts American Express, and whether the terminal accepts it by tap as well as by chip. Some terminals are set up for one and not the other.

Adding it is a business decision with its own costs, which the processor can set out for your plan. Nothing obliges anyone to decide this week.

What the customer does

The customer holds the phone near the terminal with a finger on the home button, which reads their fingerprint. There is no app to open and no card to hand over.

With an Apple Watch, they press the side button twice and hold the watch face to the reader.

The phone never passes the real card number to your terminal. It sends a separate number set up for that device, with a one-time code for each payment.

Receipts, refunds and returns

Because the phone pays with its own number, the last four digits on the receipt will not match the physical card the customer carries. Staff matching a receipt to a card for a return should expect the difference.

Refunds usually go back the same way. The customer holds the phone to the terminal again, so the money returns to the card that paid.

A short note beside the till covers both points, and saves an awkward minute when someone brings back a gift in January.

A worked example

A bird feeder maker builds cedar feeders, seed trays and squirrel-proof hanging feeders in a workshop on a rural road. It sells through garden centres, an online shop and a small showroom at the workshop, open on weekends.

November and December bring the showroom's busiest weekends, because feeders make easy gifts. Its countertop terminal takes chip cards and tap payments, and the owner assumed phones would simply work.

Yesterday he phoned the payment processor to check. The terminal could read a phone, but the account had never accepted American Express, so every Apple Pay payment would have been declined.

He chose to add American Express before the December weekends, after asking the processor what it would cost. Until then, a note at the till tells staff to ask phone users for a card.

The sign for the door waits until a friend with an iPhone 6 and an American Express card has bought something and returned it, so staff see both.

The online shop needed nothing. Its checkout cannot take Apple Pay, and nobody shopping there expects it to.

The sign on the door

People who have just set Apple Pay up will look for places to use it. A small notice on the door or at the till answers them before they queue.

Put it up only after a real payment has gone through. A sign promising phone payments at a counter that declines them is worse than no sign at all.

Keep the wording plain, such as tap payments accepted, including phones, beside the card logos you already show. If you use Apple's own mark, follow Apple's rules for displaying it.

Then say the same thing where people plan a visit: the line on your website that explains how the shop takes payment.

Nothing changes on your website yet

For a shop, this launch is about paying at the counter. Apple Pay cannot be chosen on an ordinary website checkout, so an online shop has nothing to add or switch on this week.

What it may change online is patience. Customers who get used to paying with a fingerprint will notice how much typing a card number on a phone involves.

A checkout that keeps forms short, remembers returning customers and passes payment to a provider's page closes some of that gap, and none of it depends on Apple.

The counter-case

For most shops, few customers will pay this way at first. It takes a recent iPhone and an American Express card, and many people have neither.

A business that does not take American Express, and has no wish to start, loses little by waiting to see how the service grows. One without a tap terminal can raise it when the terminal is next replaced.

Where the terminal and the account are already right, though, the cost is one test payment and a note for staff. Check both settings, test with a real phone, then put up the sign.

This week

1. Ask your processor whether the account takes American Express.
2. Check that the terminal accepts American Express by tap.
3. Decide about adding it if the answer is no.
4. Make one real test payment with an iPhone.
5. Leave a note at the till about receipts and refunds.
6. Put up a plain sign once the test works.
7. Mention phones in your website's payment details.

Step four decides whether the rest is worth doing. Settings described over the phone can be wrong, and only a real payment shows what a customer will see at your counter.

Card security on the website side, which this launch leaves alone, is covered in PCI 3.1 and the end of old SSL for card payments.

Frequently asked questions

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