What’s in Store for Retail in 2015

4. Paying by phone becomes commonplace. Mobile payment technologies have been around for some time, but I believe the launch of Apple Pay in September 2014 acted as a catalyst for real market change. Once Apple entered the mobile wallet market, retailers sat up and paid attention, with some signing up for Apple Pay and others hard at work on creating their own alternative — for example, the Merchant Customer Exchange's CurrentC — or adopting other vendors' technologies such as Google Wallet.