E-wallet
A payment app holding a balance or a linked funding source, paid from a phone rather than a card. Apple Pay and Google Pay pass an underlying card to the terminal and are accepted wherever contactless cards are; Alipay+, WeChat Pay and UnionPay QR are separate rails a merchant enables individually.
Why it matters to a merchant
A category that hides the distinction that matters operationally: some wallets present a card behind the scenes and behave like one at the counter, others are a separate rail with their own enablement, their own reporting line and their own settlement. "Do you take e-wallets" is therefore not a question with one answer, for any provider. The useful version of the question names the wallets. Apple Pay and Google Pay are the first kind — a card arriving over contactless, needing no separate enablement — while Alipay+, WeChat Pay and UnionPay QR are the second, each a separate arrangement with its own reporting. A merchant who has one of the second kind has learned nothing about whether they have the others. This is also why the answer to "we accept wallets" on a proposal is worth a follow-up: it is true of a counter that takes one of them and true of a counter that takes five, and the gap between those two is most of what a customer at the till will notice.
Related terms
In this section: The methods themselves