If you order a Domino’s Pizza Inc. (NYSE:DPZ) through the restaurant’s Android app, you can now pay with Google Wallet instead of the change under your couch, in what is probably going to become a much more common form of payment.
“This is yet another way Domino’s is using technology to improve our customer experience,” said Domino’s Pizza Inc. (NYSE:DPZ) CEO Patrick Doyle in a statement. “Google Wallet is a great technology that allows customers even more flexibility and convenience when it comes to paying for their Domino’s orders.”
Google Wallet will use Gmail, Android for reach
On its own, Google Wallet isn’t all that different from other digital wallets. It’s a lightweight (and hopefully secure) tool that lets you make payments without having to enter your credit card information every time you make a purchase online or through an app. Aside from being more convenient, using digital wallets is arguably safer than spreading your details all over the net – instead of trusting every website that you do business with you just have to trust Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) to handle its part of the transaction.
But Google Wallet comes with reach built in. Gmail has hundreds of millions of users and Android is the most popular smartphone platform in the world, so Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) will have an easier time grabbing market share than its competitors even if its digital wallet isn’t as slick. There will be the usual round of articles wondering if Google already knows too much about our lives already, and whether we really want to hand over financial data as well, but people have consistently opted for convenience over privacy (for better or worse) and there’s no reason to expect that trend to change now.
Google Wallet will put pressure on eBay management
The immediate advantage that Google Wallet gets from being attached to other Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) services stands in sharp contrast to its main competitor, PayPal, which is owned by the internet auction site eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY). Carl Icahn, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, and others have argued that this arrangement makes no sense and that PayPal needs to be spun off from eBay so that it can achieve its full potential as the premiere online payment system. If Google manages to take a big chunk of the market away from PayPal, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t, the argument between activist shareholders and eBay’s management team will probably heat up.
