Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By Kevin Woodward
@DTPaymentNews
Apple Pay’s latest incarnation—enabling one-click payments for mobile and desktop Web-site purchasing—deftly brings the familiarity of such payments to Apple Pay users and merchants. At least, that’s my take on it, having used it last week when the service was released as part of an Apple Inc. update for its Mac computers and iOS mobile devices.
The e-commerce version of Apple Pay is an attempt to decrease the number of steps it takes for a consumer to check out on a participating merchant’s Web site. This is especially important to merchants with m-commerce sites where consumers easily tire of typing in their 16-digit card numbers and addresses. Apple Pay for the Web uses the billing and shipping addresses and other payment data consumers store in the mobile-payments wallet.
In my experience, using Apple Pay for the Web was easy and had a short learning curve. The purchase, made on Apple.com, moved quickly once I selected the product. At checkout, I clicked a highly visible Apple Pay button. A dialog box containing the payment and address information from my Apple wallet appeared overlaid on the page. It did not open a new browser window or move the focus to another page.
Apple Pay on the Web requires shoppers to have a Touch ID-enabled iOS device or Apple Watch available to confirm the transaction. On the iPhone or iPad, a tap of a fingerprint against the Touch ID button does the job. Consumers with an Apple Watch must double click the side button when presented with the payment confirmation. Apple devices rely on a feature called Continuity, which enables them to share data when in close proximity. This data-sharing aspect is critical because Apple Pay on the iPhone stores the digital token that stands in for the actual card number.
A competitor to PayPal Holdings Inc.’s one-touch checkout, Apple Pay’s single-click feature lacks the potential universality of PayPal’s service. Apple Pay for the Web is restricted to Safari, an Apple-only browser. That may be OK, as analyst Marc Abbey at First Annapolis Consulting says, because Apple is building out the functionality of its mobile wallet.
While I may be more familiar than the average consumer with the way payments work, I still want an easy and trouble-free transaction, like any other shopper. Retailers want that, too. If consumers are comfortable using a particular payment method, they are more likely to use it. Recognizing that, several online merchants, like Lululemon.com and Wayfair.com, have signed on to offer Apple Pay as a payment option on their e-commerce sites.
Consumers, already used to seeing easy checkout buttons, like PayPal’s One Touch and Amazon.com Inc.’s 1-Click, may see some familiarity with the Apple Pay button. And familiarity with a method, as so many know, often portends comfort with it.
