Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Apple’s change to that model appears to be very simple: The sale is credited not to the division (online or in-store) that collects the money but to whoever actually delivers the product. The result: No more channel competition. Store managers will want those easy, pre-sold, in-and-out merged-channel customers. Sure, associates may not be able to upsell those customers. But that’s Apple.com’s job. Store associates can focus on moving merchandise out of the store as quickly as possible—and presumably taking care of those lower priority walk-in customers.

Pushing customers to do in-store pickup could also save Apple some E-Commerce shipping costs. But with only about 300 stores, almost all in urban areas, there’s still going to be a need for dedicated fulfillment centers. And turning that job over to the stores doesn’t make sense—you don’t want your fulfillment warehouse to be sitting on the most expensive retail square footage available. But it still looks closer to real merged-channel than anything else we’ve seen.

Unfortunately for bigger retail chains, this may not be a model they can pull off, even with a single view of inventory (imperative for site-to-store-in-minutes) and adjustments to store management. Apple has a limited number of SKUs, an often-fanatical customer base and enough high-margin products to make the model more forgiving of any missteps. (And although some high-margin products such as phones take a while to configure, there’s no special reason a $1,000 laptop customer couldn’t be in and out as quickly as the guy who’s picking up an inexpensive screen protector.)

But for, say, an apparel retailer with a large number of size and color varieties even for a single pair of pants, finding exactly the right item for a customer in 12 minutes is a much more challenging race—and then the customer will most likely want to try on the item anyway. Rushing customers in and out just isn’t going to happen. Some of Apple’s merged-channel model just won’t transfer to the rest of retail.

But the mobile-payments piece just might.

We’ve been assuming that mobile payments meant a replacement for Visa—or at least a replacement for that plastic rectangle, with an NFC-equipped phone mimicking a contactless payment card. That would require an iPhone with an NFC chip—which Apple didn’t deliver last month.

But now Apple is redefining mobile payments as mobile ordering plus site-to-store.

Say you’re a retailer who has done a mobile-payments deal with Apple. How might that work? The customer pays on your E-Commerce or M-Commerce site using iTunes (or whatever Apple decides to call its payment system), and then a certain number of minutes later picks up the desired item and is good to go. Apple would handle the money for the site-to-store sale, but it would also handle the messaging to the store about the transaction so stock could be pulled, the order verification once the customer walks into the store and the E-receipt delivery.

That doesn’t sound anything like Google Wallet, ISIS or PayPal’s in-store approaches. But offering that as a service could be Apple’s way into the game—and with Apple currently the darling of chains when it comes to in-store mobile POS devices, Apple may already have its foot in the door for mobile payments—no NFC required.