Samsung Pay
Samsung Pay is a digital wallet service operated by Samsung, available on Samsung Galaxy smartphones, smartwatches, and compatible devices. It allows customers to pay in-store and online using cards already stored in the Samsung Wallet app, authenticated via fingerprint, iris scan, or PIN. Like Apple Pay and Google Pay, Samsung Pay tokenises the underlying card transaction, meaning the merchant never receives the customer’s actual card credentials.
The cost structure for merchants is straightforward: Samsung charges nothing for accepting Samsung Pay. The transaction is processed as a standard card payment through the merchant’s existing PSP and acquirer, at the same rate as the underlying card. This makes Samsung Pay cost-neutral for merchants and, like Apple Pay and Google Pay, is one of the more commercially uncomplicated digital wallets to evaluate.
Samsung Pay’s original technical differentiator was Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST), a proprietary technology that allowed Samsung Pay to work with traditional magnetic stripe terminals in addition to NFC-enabled contactless terminals. This gave it a broader point-of-sale footprint than Apple Pay or Google Pay at the time of its launch. However, as NFC terminal penetration has become near-universal in most developed markets, MST’s competitive relevance has diminished significantly.
For e-commerce, Samsung Pay works via the web checkout SDK or through PSPs that support it natively. The flow redirects the customer to confirm the payment in the Samsung Wallet app via push notification, which then transmits the tokenised payment credential back to the merchant’s checkout. Samsung Pay is pre-installed on all Samsung Galaxy-class smartphones and is a default payment option on several PSP-hosted checkout integrations.
The relevant commercial question for merchants is not whether to accept Samsung Pay specifically, but whether their checkout is configured to accept all major digital wallets as a category. Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay together cover the full range of major smartphone operating systems and device brands. A merchant whose PSP supports digital wallet acceptance through standard implementations is likely already offering Samsung Pay without having made an explicit decision about it.
Samsung Pay has a stronger market position in South Korea than in Europe or the US, where Google Pay dominates Android device wallet usage given Samsung Pay’s more limited PSP network coverage outside Samsung’s own ecosystem. For European merchants, Google Pay is the more commercially relevant Android wallet to prioritise, though Samsung Pay acceptance comes with most major PSP integrations without additional effort.
Relevant markets: South Korea (dominant), United States, and selective global markets
