Google Wallet Years From Adoption

Now that Google Wallet has officially rolled out, is it time to ditch your real wallet?
Probably not for a few years, experts who follow the mobile payments segment say. Their reasoning is fairly straightforward. What we’re seeing with Google, Isis and PayPal is an early land grab for a technology that won’t be adopted for possibly five years.
Here’s why:


Retailers Aren’t On Board Yet


Google Wallet, the company’s mobile payment system, is now available at various retailers, including CVS, RadioShack and Foot Locker and more are coming soon, but it’s not available in every outlet of those chains, just select locations.
How long until all the big retailers are offering Google Wallet in all of their stores? David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, a trade publication covering the credit card market, says it will be five years or so. “It takes several years for a major U.S. retailer to decide to do something different at point of sale,” he says. “Even if they decided they wanted it today, it would still take two years.”

There Aren’t Enough Smartphones with NFC


If you want to use Google Wallet, you’ve got to have a phone with Near Field Communication. Right now, there are only a handful of such phones on the market. Bob Egan, founder of The Seraphim Group, says there are about 50 million NFC-enabled smartphones in the pipeline over the next 18 months, but even then the technology would not be widespread enough to be considered mainstream.

Consumers Aren’t Ready Yet


Changing consumer habits takes years. Remember, for instance, how slowly supermarket chains rolled out self-payment kiosks over the last decade? “You’re asking people to do something they don’t do right now,” says Egan. “It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Concerns over security will also complicate things, as will the payment system, in which the phone bill replaces credit card bills. “People don’t trust their carriers to get it right,” says Jack Gold, an analyst at J.Gold Associates.

Google’s Goals


If this technology is still years away from adoption, why is Google making a big deal about Google Wallet now? Egan says that it all goes back to Google’s main business: advertising.
Tracking what consumers actually buy is a huge piece of the puzzle for advertisers. “They’re making assumptions on consumer behavior right now,” says Egan. “This will allow them to be more predictive.”
Google Wallet will also let Android keep up in the features war with iOS and BlackBerry, says Noah Elkin, an analyst with eMarketer, Over time, people will use their phones as a wallet, Elkin says.
“It’s another step of migrating everything we do onto a single device,” says Elkin, noting that smartphones have pretty much obviated the need for cameras. “It’s possible to envision that [phones] will supplant cameras, but consumers have been taking their cards out of their wallets for yeras and they don’t have a great problem with that.”
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