Lemon to Finally Squeeze Payments into Its Mobile Wallet App

With its newest update, Lemon is offering a 15-day free trial of its paid Wallet Plus service, a marketing scheme to whet consumers' appetites for the payments-capable mobile wallet it plans to roll out in the next couple of weeks.

Lemon's current app lets consumers scan and store payment cards, and the paid Wallet Plus version adds card monitoring and other security services for $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year.  In adding a payment method to its app, Lemon plans to decrease the amount of checkout abandonment on online retailers.

"Point of sale isn't broken; most people are happy to pay with cash or a credit card at point of sale, but people don't want to pay with a credit card on a mobile phone," says Wences Casares, founder and CEO of Lemon. "There are ways to improve that…and not necessarily just with small ticket items."

Lemon has clearly had payment ambitions since the company launched about a year and a half ago. Its app generates a QR code for scanned payment cards, though these have served more as a placeholder — the company doesn't indicate to consumers how to use those codes for payment.

Lemon plans to stop using QR codes because it takes up too much valuable real estate of a phone's screen, Casares says. He would not provide more details on how Lemon plans to facilitate payments.

In December, Lemon added support for Apple's Passbook, another step in the direction of adding payments capabilities.

Lemon users can add any card they'd carry in their physical wallet to the mobile wallet. This includes ID cards, credit cards, tickets, loyalty cards, insurance cards and receipts.

While consumers in the U.S. have been slow to adopt mobile payments, the technology is seen as an attractive way to deal with plastic overload as financial institutions push specialized credit and debit cards and merchants push more loyalty cards.

A small percentage of Lemon customers have switched to Wallet Plus since February, when the update and free trial was released. With Wallet Plus customers are able to see balances for all accounts linked and sends activation date and balance due alerts.

Wallet Plus users receive BillGuard's transaction monitoring service, which Lemon added in November. And if customers lose their physical wallet, the Wallet Plus provides a service for canceling and renewing all the cards stored.

The Wallet app also allows consumers to scan and store their receipts, though Lemon is downplaying this feature as it shifts its focus to payments.