• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, March 20, 2015

While gaining traction, using a phone to pay for things in stores still has a bit of a road ahead.

Some activity in mobile payments seems to be moving things along, but hardly causing a full-blown move to payments.

Recent launches and introductions by Apple, Samsung and PayPal may at least cause some people to give payments a shot.

Consider that to use Apple Pay, a person has to have an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, set it up (a relatively simple feat), find a store that has terminals that can use it and then tap away.

It turns out that nearly 40% of iPhone 6 owners have at least tried Apple Pay, based on estimates from Baird Equity Research.

For overall mobile payments, almost half (40%) of online consumers have made at least one in-store purchase via mobile phone, according to the Baird survey. Here’s the payment method they used:

• 13% -- PayPal
• 11% -- Google Wallet
• 6% -- Apple Pay

The catch is that only about 1 in 10 consumers make mobile purchases in a store more than once a month. This is hardly a daily habit.

As might be expected, those 18 to 24 years old made more mobile payments in stores compared to other age groups.

The point is that more people will be faced with using their phones to move money, whether from themselves to a store or even to each other, as I wrote about here yesterday (Mobile Payments Validation & Facebook’s Peer-to-Peer Plan).

MasterCard executives regularly point out that 85% of payments globally still are made by cash.

But any conversion of that 85% over to mobile payments could be a significant boost.