Being able to pay with a mobile phone doesn’t solve any pressing need for a consumer.

Some may consider flying in the face of the wisdom emanating from Cupertino, CA,  but Jim DuBoyce, a payments specialist at W. Capra Consulting Group, says consumers are not going to use Apple’s mobile payments service Apple Pay without a good reason.

“Mobile payments have been really slow to catch on with customers,” he says. “It’s really difficult to change consumers’ payment preferences. What really gets them to change is some type of inducement.”

For mobile payments, that could be special offers or a loyalty program. The best example of this, he says, is the much-lauded Starbucks Corp. program that lets consumers link a gift card to a mobile wallet app on a smartphone. Consumers use their phones to pay at a Starbucks. The loyalty program built into the app that automatically gives consumers special offers that can be redeemed at stores. At the end of 2013, 11% of Starbucks sales volume was coming through mobile payments, Starbucks said on its fiscal 2013 conference call.

DuBoyce says the expectation of reward likely comes from the branded credit card offers in stores. Consumers have grown accustomed to receiving a percentage off immediately after signing up for a credit card in a store. That transfers to using an app to pay.

The good news for retailers is getting into Apple Passbook, the mobile wallet app on every iPhone used to deliver Apple Pay, doesn’t require that they accept Apple Pay. Passbook has been used for a couple of years to aggregate things like boarding passes, loyalty cards and coupons. And retailers can—and should—still use it for that, even if they’re years away from accepting Apple Pay, says Julie Novack, the executive vice president of mobile solution at Vibes, a mobile marketing firm.

Vibes has seen a 1,400% increase in consumers adding Passbook passes across its 300 retail clients in the past year, and interest has been picking up among consumers and clients since the Apple Pay announcement.

Next month the industry will find out which retailers are first out of the gate with loyalty programs linked to Apple Pay and Passbook when Apple formally launches Apple Pay. Novack says Sears Holding Corp. is one retailer beginning to link its loyalty program, called Shop Your Way, with Apple Passbook. Sears did not return a request for comment.

Novack says getting up on Apple Passbook with a few offers and coupons can take just a few days and is a great option for retailers looking to create a presence on the app but who might not be ready to accept Apple Pay.

The ability to personalize those offers and coupons will come with time. Right now, there’s no way to use purchase history to tailor offers within Passbook, but DuBoyce says that’s a natural extension of the technology.

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