The introduction of Apple Pay created excitement throughout the payment world. Will the Apple behemoth disrupt the payments game? Will consumers and merchants embrace it as they have all other Apple innovations?

But one of the key questions seems to have been ignored or easily glazed over. It is a question not so much about what Apple Pay is or does, but what it isn’t and doesn’t do.

The question is why Apple Pay is not an online payment method. Apple Pay works at the physical point of sale and in apps, but not for e-commerce. That is odd. Is Apple purposefully ignoring this channel?  

Point-of-sale transaction volumes and revenues dwarf those in e-commerce so it may make more economic sense to target physical retail.

But what if it is Apple’s strategy to skip e-commerce altogether? The thinking could be that e-commerce will gradually morph into m-commerce as more and more online payments are done from a device.

As consumers leave their bulky desktops behind and use their iPhones and iPads to shop on the go, shopping becomes truly mobile. As consumers move about the physical world with their devices, the two worlds will merge. M-commerce and physical retail will be combined in an omnichannel consumer environment and Apple will be poised to take a significant share of the payments revenue.

But wait, Apple Pay only works for in-app payments, not those made inside the browser of the device. Only the very large retailers have their own apps meaning that Apple leaves out a significant portion of commerce potentially conducted on a device.

And, Apple also makes desktops and laptops on which people work and shop.

In-browser payments are an important channel on or off devices and ignoring them simply makes little sense.

I suspect that the truth is more mundane. For now Apple Pay needs a physical device to work and is integrated only into Passbook. The next step for Apple is surely to expand Apple Pay beyond Passbook and to integrate it into the Safari browser for mobile and desktop. That will likely enable e-commerce payments that are as simple as payments in apps.

Apple Pay will then be a truly seamless omnichannel payment experience spanning across all devices and all retail channels allowing for one-click payments in all environments. This is the holy grail of payments and could really be the game changer.