PayPal Dominates the Digital Wallet Market

This chart illustrates consumer awareness and usage of digital wallet services in the United States.

The “digital wallet” refers to services that let you store payment information (i.e. credit or debit card) on your PC, smartphone or tablet to let you make on-or offline purchases without having to re-enter that information or without using your actual wallet.

As much as we read about digital wallets being the future of payments, very few people actually seem to be using such services. A new study by comScore reveals why digital wallet offerings are struggling to reach broad adoption: many people have never heard of them.

According to the study, only 51 percent of the responding consumers have ever heard of a digital payment service other than PayPal, and, to make things worse, only 12 percent of consumers have ever used one. eBay’s payment service PayPal is currently miles ahead of the competition in terms of consumer awareness and usage and it seems unlikely that any of the competing services can close that gap anytime soon. Starting off as a service to facilitate payments on eBay’s auction platform, PayPal has reached wide adoption among e-retailers and is currently pushing into physical retail as well.