You'll never be profitable without Apple Pay.

The headline is blunt, and I stand by it. But before going further, let's set the scope: what follows only concerns businesses that take money online. A shop, a booking, a deposit, ticketing, a subscription. If you take no payment on your site, you can move along, nothing here will serve you.

For everyone else, I'm writing this because I've just recorded a figure at a client's, and it's higher than anything I expected. I give it below, with the caveat that goes with it, because a figure without its caveat is worth nothing.

What I'll try to show comes in three parts. First where your customers now are, because the problem isn't your site but the gap between your site and their habits. Then what that represents concretely, in money and in trust. Finally what to do depending on your situation, and there are only three cases.

Tell me if you think I'm overstating it. But read the figure first.

Everything was simplified without you

Before the numbers, look at where your customers are. Because the problem isn't your site: it's the gap between your site and everything else they use the rest of the day.

One click, and it's paid

On Amazon you buy in one click. The card is stored, the address too, nothing to re-enter. On Uber you get out of the car and it's settled, without even thinking about it. On Airbnb, on delivery apps, on ticketing platforms: the same everywhere.

These companies have spent fortunes removing the moment of payment. Not improving it: making it disappear.

And that has become your customers' benchmark. Not the competitor across the street, those platforms.

The phone is always there, the card isn't

Here's the physical detail nobody states, and it explains everything.

Everyone has their phone on them. Permanently, in hand or thirty centimetres away. Almost nobody has their bank card within immediate reach at the moment the urge to buy arrives.

So when your page asks for a card number, you're not asking for some typing. You're asking someone to get up, find a wallet, copy out sixteen digits, a date and a security code, then confirm in a banking app.

Meanwhile the impulse fades. And nobody will make that effort for you if there's an alternative elsewhere.

How far the removal of friction goes

Contactless payment became the norm to the point that nobody notices it any more. Then the phone replaced the card, then the watch replaced the phone. There are even payment rings, and they're no longer a trade-show gimmick.

What that says about the era is simple: nobody is trying to make paying pleasant any more, they're trying to make it vanish. And today, that's technically possible.

A business that in 2026 still asks people to fetch a card in order to book a table isn't making an aesthetic choice. It's charging its customers an effort.

The subject isn't payment. It's the gap between your page and everything your customers use the rest of the day.

What it looks like in numbers

Let's get concrete, because this is where the subject stops being a matter of opinion. What follows comes from an online booking system I follow, recorded over one full month.

40% of payments

Over that month, around 40% of payments went through Apple Pay. Google Pay is included in that figure but remains very much in the minority.

Four payments in ten. Not four per cent, four in ten. It's the figure that makes every business owner I show it to look up, because nobody imagines it at that level.

It isn't a market average and I'm not presenting it as one. It depends on the sector, the average order value, the clientele. But the order of magnitude is there, and there's nothing exceptional about it.

No, you wouldn't lose exactly 40%

Honesty matters here, otherwise the figure is worthless.

Removing Apple Pay tomorrow doesn't make 40% of revenue disappear. Some of those people would pull out a card and pay anyway, because they genuinely wanted to book.

But another share doesn't. They postpone, they close the tab, they look elsewhere. Maybe thirty per cent remains, maybe less. And that loss appears nowhere in your figures. You never see the people who didn't pay.

Which is exactly what makes the decision easy: the gain can be measured, the loss stays invisible.

The logo that reassures, and the ones that no longer do

There's a second effect, less obvious than the first, and it costs nothing either.

Displaying Apple Pay on your payment page is a signal of seriousness. The person understands they won't have to hand you their card number: a third party they already know stands between you and them. The security objection falls before it's even been formed.

Conversely, the strips of logos everyone sticks at the bottom of a page, card networks, certificates, bank names, no longer reassure anyone. They're everywhere, including on dubious sites, so they prove nothing.

The difference comes down to this: a logo you display is a claim, a payment method you offer is a commitment.

The payment page that drives people away

Last point, and the one I see most often when reviewing a site.

Plenty of businesses take payment through legacy banking solutions. They work, in the sense that the money arrives. But the page shown to the customer is often poorly adapted to mobile, slow, and visually ten years old.

Look at yours on a phone, honestly, as if you were a stranger. Would you give your card to that page? Plenty of business owners I ask say no after three seconds.

And it's the most expensive place in the journey to lose someone, because that person had cleared every previous step. They were ready. You're not losing a browser, you're losing a decided customer.

The gain can be measured. The loss appears nowhere: you never see the people who didn't pay.

What to do, in order

The good news is that there are only three possible situations, and each has a clear answer.

If your system supports it, enable it today

This is the most common case, and the most frustrating: the function exists, it simply was never switched on.

If you use a modern payment provider, it's a checkbox and a domain verification. A matter of hours, not weeks.

Do it now, before reading on. It's probably the change with the best effort-to-result ratio on your entire site.

If it doesn't, demand it

You use a subscription booking product and it doesn't offer digital wallets.

Write to your vendor and be direct: it's a renewal criterion. You're probably not the only client asking, and that kind of message carries more weight on a roadmap than people assume.

Set yourself a deadline. Waiting indefinitely for it to arrive some day costs you for the entire wait.

If it can't, change systems

Some tools never will, because it isn't in their model. There the answer is simple, even if it isn't comfortable: change.

Either you take another product, or you build your own. And that's exactly the moment a custom tool stops being a luxury: you don't do it for comfort, you do it because the standard option costs you money every month.

The building blocks exist, they're documented, and wiring a modern payment provider into a bespoke journey is no longer a major undertaking.

What it costs, and what it returns

Let's be clear about the costs, because I'm not selling a miracle.

• A setup, measured in days if the journey is simple.
• Per-transaction fees, generally higher than a classic banking solution.
• Verification and testing time before going live.

Now weigh that against the right number. Not the initial invoice: twelve months of conversion gain. On the journeys where I've made this replacement, the conversion rate at the payment step doesn't rise by a few points, it changes order of magnitude.

Slightly higher fees on twice as many transactions is still a very good deal.

A function you can switch on in an hour and haven't switched on has been costing you every day since you didn't.

There is no third option

I'll finish here because this is the essential part, and the rest is implementation.

Either you install it, or you don't

There's no halfway here, no lightweight version, no "we'll see next year". Payment either works in two seconds or it doesn't.

Every day you go without it, a share of your visitors reaches the end of the journey, discovers they need to fetch a card, and stops there. They won't write to tell you.

A site taking payment online without a digital wallet will never reach its actual profitability. Not because it's bad, but because it loses people in the final metre.

And check, as with everything else

Don't take my word for it, and that holds for everything I write.

Compare your abandonment rate at the payment step before and after, over comparable periods. If your journey is split into steps, the answer reads in minutes, and it isn't up for debate.

If you aren't in a position to make that comparison, that's another problem, and a more serious one than Apple Pay.

If you'd like me to look at your payment journey, write to me. It's usually the shortest check I run, and the most profitable.