You’d have to have been living in an underground bunker for the past few days to have not come across the viral fued between Apple and pop renegade, Taylor Swift. But clashing horns with feisty songstresses is not the only reason the tech company has found itself in the news this week. British businesses, brace yourself because you’re about to come face-to-face with Apple Pay and it’s set to revolutionise the way you shift your stock.

Apple Pay is a service that has already been rolled out across other parts of the world but at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) earlier this month, the company announced it would be launching it in the UK also. Wasting no time at all, Apple Pay is set to be ready for business in July of this year and will be bringing a majority of the banks that issue debit and credit cards to UK customers and more than 250,000 merchants on board.

Wait, what is Apple Pay?

Okay so in a nutshell, Apple Pay is a service that allows one-touch transactions both in store and online, and is another wheel in the cog for the shift from physical to mobile payments. Similar to the methods of contactless payments that are already on offer across the country, in-store purchases will be enabled by showing your Apple device to a payment terminal. Online transactions will be completed via apps downloaded onto the device and both methods will be verified using Touch ID and fingerprint reading technology.

An advanced technological process known by industry geeks as ‘tokenisation’ is enabling the possibility to make quick, simple and secure payments via mobile devices. Some terminals will impose a £20 purchase limit but this is set to increase to £30 by September 2015. For merchants with terminals that are “capable and configured properly” in accordance with network specifications, this limit doesn’t apply and they will be able to offer much larger transaction sums.

Hop on the bandwagon

Apple Pay is set to make buying goods and services from SMEs more seamless and secure than ever before so it’s about time you got on board. We did warn you that now is the time to modernise your payment methods to keep your customers happy but we want to reiterate our message in the light of this new revelation.

For small and medium-sized enterprises that are already offering card payment and already have contactless terminals, the job’s a goodun – you can just sit tight until July and let Apple do all the hard work. However for those that don’t, here’s your chance to join the modern age or risk losing customers that are forever searching for faster, more convenient ways to go about their day. A mobile app for those businesses selling physical products is also something to seriously consider if you haven’t done so already.

Keep your customers sweet

Consumers are constantly craving the next best thing and you need to provide them with it or they will, quite mercilessly, move on to the next guy who can give them what they want. Apple Pay offers improved usability and a more positive customer experience that means they can avoid the long checkout forms and account sign-ups that double their rate of grey hair growth on a daily basis. Those with an Apple Watch will be able to make payments without even having to extract their device from their pockets. What a time to be alive!

The service is also a massive game changer when it comes to customer reward programmes and loyalty schemes. Apple Pay will negate the need for paper loyalty cards that are easily lost, damaged or forgotten, which is great for streamlining the consumer shopping experience and for the ever-disintegrating ozone layer. Win, win!