Payment and Services

January 2018

Native mobile application stores have made it much easier for developers to monetize some of their applications, either by selling the application itself to users, or by providing in-app purchases.

While Web applications can use well-known on-line payment solutions, these solutions have so far proved much harder to use on mobile devices.

Well-deployed technologies

HTML provides specific help for autocomplete of credit card details (through the cc-xxx autocomplete tokens), making it easier to pay via credit cards once these details have been entered once.

Feature	Specification	Maturity	Current implementations
Autocomplete	autocomplete attribute in HTML 5.1

Technologies in progress

Following a successful workshop on Web payments in 2014 and discussions on use cases and priorities for Web payments in the Web Payment Interest Group, W3C chartered a Web Payments Working Group to develop browser APIs to facilitate payment operations in Web applications:

The Payment Request API defines an API to allow merchants (i.e. web sites selling physical or digital goods) to utilize one or more payment methods with minimal integration. In this model, browsers facilitate the payment flow between merchant and user.
The Basic Card Payment specification describes data structures that enable the use of debit and credit cards in the Payment Request API.
The Payment Handler API defines a standard way to initiate payment requests from Web pages and applications.

Feature	Specification	Current implementations
Web Payment	Payment Request API	Experimental Shipped
	Basic Card Payment	Under consideration In development Shipped
	Payment Handler API	Experimental

See anything missing?

If you know of use cases that cannot be achieved today with Web technologies, please let us know!

To that end, you can start a new topic in the W3C’s discourse forum or raise an issue on the GitHub repository of this document.

GitHub Discourse