Survey: Two-thirds of top 100 U.S. retailers balk at adding Apple Pay this year

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has claimed that around half of the top 100 merchants in the U.S. will be supporting its Apple Pay mobile payments system sometime this year. However, in an effort to assess Apple's progress, Reuters went through the list of the National Retail Federation's top 100 U.S. retailers, and surveyed the 98 that had brick-and-mortar outlets (two of the top 100 sell only online). According to a Reuters report, 85 supplied detailed responses and 11 others supplied information only about whether or not they accept Apple Pay; two did not respond.

The news service found that while some of the country's top shops and retailers said they use and like Apple Pay, fewer than a quarter of the retailers surveyed said they currently accept Apple Pay, and nearly two-thirds of the chains said categorically they would not be accepting it this year. Reuters found that only four companies said they have plans to join the program in the next year, which would put Apple short of the roughly 50 merchants it said would be signed up out of the top 100 in 2015.

Many retailers cited insufficient customer demand as a reason for not adopting Apple Pay, along with a lack of access to data generated in Apple Pay transactions and the cost of technology to enable Apple Pay. Some merchants plan to adopt the Merchant Content Exchange's mobile payments system, which will launch a mobile payments service under the CurrentC brand. 

Apple's struggles to gain traction reflect a larger challenge facing all kinds of companies that want to make mobile payments take off. Samsung Electronics said this week that it will delay the start of its own mobile payment service until September; the company previously said the service would start as soon as July. Article