Google wallet how does it work

Join now to earn cashback and rewards. Learn more. Get started. Say hello to a better relationship with money Google Pay is a safe, simple, and helpful way to pay and manage your money. Scan to get the app. Download for Android Download for iOS.

Pay a friend or a group in a snap. Pay a friend or a group in a snap Send money to a friend or start a group to split expenses for dinner, bills, rent, and more. Private Send and request money in private groups. Connected Plan, split, and make group payments right from your phone. Convenient Easily find your friends and make a fast payment. Stay connected with your favorite businesses. Keep your cards and accounts within tapping distance. Keep your cards and accounts within tapping distance Keep credit cards, debit cards, transit passes, and more on your phone for quick, easy access.

Learn more about transit with Clipper. Get a fuller picture of your finances. So much so that Google even tracks your transactions, saving order details, almost as if you stuffed your receipt into your wallet. This data will be used, as with all data on Google, to serve you ads that matter to you, which feeds directly into Google's business model. Apple, on the other hand, explicitly declares that it will never track your transactions.

In fact, Apple won't even store your card details on their servers or on the devices. All Apple does is transmit your card to the bank, authenticate with the bank and receive and store the DAN that the bank sends back.

Apple is not a payment intermediary, and is instead positioning itself as, true to its name, a payment medium alone. In essence, an Apple Pay enabled phone is an expensive and beautifully crafted credit card; one that can be lost or become useless if the phone battery dies.

Though fingerprint scan security and the ability to remotely disable the phone offer quite a bit of protection, if someone does get access to your Apply Pay phone, you have to take up the issue with your bank and not Apple.

This approach also means Apple must negotiate deals with banks and get them to sign-up for the payment revolution, a task that has limited the number of cards that can be used with Apple Pay at the time of launch. Not tracking transactions also means Apple has no way to monetize the user, and therefore it charges a per-transaction fee to the banks that it partners with, though the details of this fee structure remain somewhat murky.

Things get even more confusing when one wonders why banks will pay a per-transaction fee to Apple when Google's approach costs them nothing. Perhaps Apple has managed to convince them that its users will shop more with Apple Pay, or perhaps banks believe that they gain an exclusivity advantage over banks that are not partnered with Apple. Or maybe Apple just does a much better job than Google at coordinating the different stakeholders involved in such a complex and intricate network.

But despite Apple's considerable clout, all is not yet well with mobile payments. Instead, they are working on their own alternative, CurrentC , which will save them considerable amounts of money by charging a customer's bank account directly instead of paying transaction fees to payment processors like VISA V and MasterCard MA.

Neither Google nor Apple offers much to the vendors for adopting their systems; although at the moment the CurrentC system is very clunky, requiring the user to take a picture of a QR Code to pay, making its success winning consumers seem unlikely.

Apple Pay claims to be "your wallet without the wallet," a description that, in truth, fits Google Wallet better. And Google Wallet calls itself "an easier way to pay," which in all fairness is what Apple's ought to be saying. For the consumer, both systems make minor improvements in convenience and dramatic improvements in security.

For the industry however, the tradeoffs are still very unclear. Lifestyle Advice. Credit Cards. Financial Technology. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. For this reason, Google and Apple are both racing to discover some innovation to give virtual wallets a clear and distinct advantage which bank cards cannot offer. Neither one has yet found that tipping point. According to Business News Daily, Google is discontinuing the processing of payments for certain digital goods such as e-books, subscriptions, online games and music.

They are, however, hoping to expand Google Wallet's influence on ecommerce with increased support for physical goods merchants. In conclusion, Google Wallet isn't yet the best payment option for ecommerce; but as time goes on, it is likely to become a viable and even essential financial service.

In The Economist, Jennifer Schulz, Visa's global head of ecommerce, thinks that there will be a period of time where virtual wallet companies will pop up and then fail, eventually leaving a few wallet providers left. While there is no way to predict which virtual wallets will endure, there's a good chance Google Wallet will be one of them.

Start your free trial High-volume or established business? Request a demo. Payment Gateways What is Google Wallet and what does it mean for ecommerce?

How it works Google Wallet is what is known as a server-side wallet, which means that all of a user's information is stored remotely on Google's system, rather than on the user's device. Neither charge fees. Liability rules are the same as regular card transactions. Both can support rewards programs. Both make the purchasing process much faster.

Both utilize NFC near field communications for in-store purchases. What ecommerce merchants need to know Google Wallet is becoming more popular, which means more people are going to expect it at their favorite stores. The limitations of Google Wallet According to Business News Daily, Google is discontinuing the processing of payments for certain digital goods such as e-books, subscriptions, online games and music.

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