How to Use Your Walgreens Card with Apple Pay

Walgreens is the first retail store to implement their store loyalty card into Apple Pay. Here’s how to use your Walgreens Balance Rewards loyalty card with Apple Pay on your iPhone.

Apple announced alongside iOS 9 back in September that stores would be able to integrate their loyalty cards into Apple Pay and not just in Wallet. The first store to make this happen is Walgreens.

This was part of a big change for iOS 9, which rebranded the Passbook app and is now called Wallet. It still acts the same as before, but it’s simply an effort by Apple to make the app more like a wallet rather than a passbook (what is a passbook anyway? Exactly.).

On top of this, store-branded credits cards are also a new feature in Apple Pay, where stores that have their own store credit cards can be used with Apple Pay, allowing iPhone users to take advantage of the credit card perks, while using Apple Pay to pay for their items at checkout.

Read: Why Your iPhone Should Never Replace Your Wallet

Kohl’s is the only store right now that supports this feature, and Walgreens is the first store to integrate their loyalty card into Apple Pay. Here’s how to use your Walgreens Balance Rewards card with Apple Pay.

How It Works

Before this new feature, you could still have your Walgreens Balance Rewards card in the Wallet app and simply pull it up to reveal a barcode that the cashier would then scan with their scan gun.

This time around, however, users can pull up their Balance Rewards card within the Wallet app and scan it themselves at the pay terminal, just like they would do if they were using Apple Pay to buy something, only this time you’re simply scanning your loyalty card at the terminal.

After the scan goes through, you can then pay with your credit or debit card using Apple Pay. If you’d like, you can still do it the old fashioned way, where you pull up your Walgreens card and have them scan the code manually, but this new way makes it bit easier and quicker.

How to Use Your Walgreens Card with Apple Pay

If you already have your Walgreens Balance Rewards card in the Wallet app, you’ll be good to go and you can use it with Apple Pay at the pay terminal. However, if you don’t yet have the card in Wallet, here’s how to add it.

Read: How to Set Up Apple Pay

To set up your Walgreens Balance Rewards card in Apple Wallet to use with Apple Pay, you’ll first need to download the Walgreens app from the App Store.

After you download the app, open it up and log into your Walgreens account. You need one in order to get a Balance Rewards card, so if you don’t yet have a Balance Rewards card, go ahead and sign up for a Walgreens account to get one.

After you log in or sign up, tap on Balance Rewards on the home screen of the Walgreens app.

Your card will appear on the screen along with its barcode. Go ahead and tap on Add to Apple Wallet.

You can choose whether you want the card to automatically pop up when you’re at your preferred Walgreens location. If you don’t want that, simply tap Add Without Store.

Next, you’ll get a preview of what your Balance Rewards card will look like in the Wallet app. Go ahead and tap Next in the top-right corner.

On the next screen, you can select whether or not you want your Walgreens card to be automatically selected when paying at Walgreens. Choose either Automatically Select or Do Not Automatically Select.

After that, your Walgreens card will now be in the Wallet app. When you pull it up, it’ll ask you to place your iPhone near the card reader at the checkout lane and you simply hold it up there and scan your fingerprint at the same time.

If you want to do it the old fashioned way, simply just tap Show Code to show the barcode of your Walgreens card to have the cashier scan it.