Accepting digital wallet payments is becoming standard practice for businesses that process in-person customer transactions. Customers are increasingly making purchases with their phones instead of their physical wallets and cards, and retail businesses are responding by expanding the types of payment methods they offer. In 2025, customers were 165% more likely to use a digital wallet than any other form of online payment.
What’s in this article?
- What are digital wallets?
- Why businesses should accept digital wallets
- How to accept digital wallet payments
- What hardware do I need to accept digital wallet payments?
- Costs associated with digital wallet payments
- Digital wallet apps
- How Stripe Payments can help
What are digital wallets?
Digital wallet technology turns smartphones into payment devices that can initiate financial transactions. A digital or mobile wallet holds various payment methods, such as credit cards, debit cards, and bank account numbers, that customers can use at the point of sale.
Popular digital wallets include:
- PayPal
- Samsung Pay
- Apple Pay
- Google Pay
- Venmo
- Cash App
Most digital wallets allow mobile devices to make payments at any point of sale that is enabled for contactless transactions. Some also allow customers to use rewards, spend loyalty points, or store concert and movie tickets, personal identification, boarding passes, and more.
Here’s what businesses should know to begin accepting this increasingly popular payment method.
Why businesses should accept digital wallets
Expanding the number of payment methods you accept can benefit your business, while offering limited payment options can reduce conversion rates because they create a barrier for would-be customers. Digital wallets, in particular, offer businesses unique advantages. Whether your business primarily sells in-person, online, or both, digital wallets give customers flexibility and speed up the checkout process. In a physical store, customers can tap a smartphone or smartwatch to pay in seconds. Online, customers can check out in a single click, giving them fewer reasons to abandon their cart before completing the purchase.
Customers increasingly prefer digital wallets over other payment methods: 15% of digital wallet users report regularly leaving their physical wallets at home, and an additional 11% consider doing so when they know they’ll be able to use a digital wallet. Adopting digital wallets can also help you reach a broader customer base. Asia dominates when it comes to digital wallet spend, but adoption is growing in many regions. More than 4.3 billion people use digital wallets globally, including 57% of US adults as of 2024. Digital wallets make your business more accessible for people who prefer this payment method.
Digital wallets employ encrypted transactions and biometric authentication, which makes them highly secure. Because digital wallets interface with most modern payment systems, businesses have minimal—if any—work to do in order to accept this payment type. All Stripe hardware, for example, can accept digital wallet payments.
How to accept digital wallet payments
Accepting digital wallet payments is a straightforward process. Here’s how to do it:
- Identify your target audience’s preferences: Determine which digital wallets your customers are most likely to use. If you operate internationally, look at local digital wallets in every country or region where you do business.
- Choose a payment processor: Select a payment processor that supports the digital wallets you want to accept and offers the features you need (e.g., one-click checkout). If you’re accepting online payment, you’ll also need a payment gateway. Some payments providers combine the two services.
- Create a merchant account: Set up a merchant account with your chosen payment processor. This usually includes verifying your identity and connecting your business bank account.
- Integrate the payment processor: Connect the payment processor to your point-of-sale system (POS) for in-person transactions and your website or app for online transactions. This often involves using application programming interface (API) keys to integrate the processor with your checkout process.
- Test your system: Test your payment system with different digital wallets to ensure everything works as expected before launching it to customers. If you’re accepting payments in-person and online, test both scenarios.
- Launch: Once you’ve confirmed everything works correctly, you can start accepting digital wallets.
What hardware do I need to accept digital wallet payments?
Digital wallet payments are processed in person using near-field communication (NFC), a technology that enables two devices in close proximity to wirelessly transmit payment information and communicate with each other. Mobile card readers and modern payment terminals often accept contactless payments using digital wallets.
Costs associated with digital wallet payments
Payment processing providers often charge fees to process these contactless payments. However, Stripe charges no additional fees to process Apple Pay payments, and the pricing is the same as for other card transactions.
Most digital wallet providers make money by charging a small percentage on each transaction to the banks and other financial institutions that host the payment methods stored in the wallet. In most cases, this extra cost isn’t charged to customers or the businesses they patronize.
Digital wallet apps
Digital wallet providers that currently dominate the industry include apps such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and various apps from the major credit card networks. The digital wallet market is expected to continue expanding over the next few years, with new competitors entering the space.
How Stripe Payments can help
Stripe Payments provides a unified, global payments solution that helps any business accept digital wallet payments online, in person, and around the world.
Stripe Payments can help you:
- Optimize your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours with prebuilt payment UIs, access to 100+ payment methods, including more than a dozen digital wallet payment methods, and Link, a wallet built by Stripe.
- Expand to new markets faster: Reach customers worldwide and reduce the complexity and cost of multicurrency management with cross-border payment options, available in 195 countries across 135+ currencies.
- Unify payments in person and online: Easily track and reconcile digital wallet payments across online and in-person channels.
- Improve payments performance: Increase revenue with a range of customizable, easy-to-configure payment tools, including no-code fraud protection and advanced capabilities to improve authorization rates.
- Move faster with a flexible, reliable platform for growth: Build on a platform designed to scale with you, with 99.999% uptime and industry-leading reliability.
Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments, or get started today.
The content in this article is for general information and education purposes only and should not be construed as legal or tax advice. Stripe does not warrant or guarantee the accurateness, completeness, adequacy, or currency of the information in the article. You should seek the advice of a competent attorney or accountant licensed to practice in your jurisdiction for advice on your particular situation.