Apple Pay has been a 'disappointment' to nearly half its users
But many of those retailers are not actually ready to offer Apple Pay, according to a new study by market research firm Phoenix.
Nearly half of the people Phoenix surveyed who tried to use Apple Pay in-store reported problems with the service.
"The demand is there: 59% of Apple Pay users have gone into a store and asked to make a purchase with Apple Pay," researcher Greg Weed writes. "But so is the disappointment: 47% visited a store that was listed as an Apple Pay merchant only to find out that the specific store they visited did not accept (or were not ready to accept) Apple Pay."
That's a pretty big turn-off, for a still-small group of people. A recent study conducted by anti-fraud startup Trustev found that 79% of people with the iPhone 6 ot 6 Plus still haven't even tried it.
For its study, Pheonix surveyed more than 3,000 households. Of those households, there were 523 iPhone 6 or 6 Plus owners, 350 Apple Pay adopters, and 302 Apple Pay users who have made at least one purchase in the past four months. So, overall, Phoenix's numbers were better for Apple than Trustev's, since it found that 57% of people with the right phone have at least tried Apple Pay.
But the people who have been able to use Apple Pay in-store are having issues, too.
"Two-out-of-three Apple Pay users have reported a problem at checkout," another Pheonix researcher, Leon Majors, writes, "Mostly related to terminals not working or taking too long to make the transaction, inaccurate posting of transactions and the inability of cashiers to help buyers who needed assistance in using Apple Pay."
Despite Apple's sky-high ambitions for its fledgling payments service and usual control-freak mentality, the way that merchants educate and enables potential users is out of its hands.
Business Insider reached out to Apple for comment, and will update if we hear back.