TW Commentary: Why Apple Pay makes Mobile Commerce incredibly easy

What Google did is provide easy access to the best location and map data in a simple, easily integratable way. Without Google Maps, we wouldn’t have companies like Foursquare, Yelp, etc. They all would have needed to build their own mapping infrastructure or rely on a more expensive / less accurate one. With Google they just used the best possible solution, for free. It suited both sides. Google got a lot of data out of this symbiosis and achieved what it always wants: more data. And app developers didn’t have to worry about location data and just build the best possible services around it.

Apple just did the same for payment. By integrating a payment services on the OS level, they basically are taking care of the whole, extremely complex process that is required to authenticate payments. Now any developer out there can just use the Apple Pay API to integrate payment into their own application.

This can have tremendous consequences. One of which should be a very scary proposition for Amazon. The lesson here can be derived from another Ecommerce company: Alibaba. What Alibaba did is offer a way for millions of manufacturers to sell to anyone in China and then the whole world. They offered those manufacturers a way to present themselves and they took care of the infrastructure. Additionally, they managed the trust issue, by keeping the money until the customers received their satisfactory product from the manufacturer / merchant.

Simply put, they created a market where there was none before. There’s huge potential for the same thing happening with the introduction of Apple Pay. Imagine the proposition of building an application as an author of books and just selling your own content, without anyone in between, directly to your clients. Authors with a large enough audience could use this to establish a new source of revenue. Building those kind of applications isn’t expensive anymore. Most of the technology is already made and available as open-source. The hardest part is not reaching the audience, it’s managing the payment process. With Apple Pay this is not an issue anymore.

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