Web Commerce Interest Group

Merchant Adoption

<Ian> Ian Jacobs' slides on merchant adoption

<Ian> IJ: Any suggestions?:

<Ian> ltoth: We do a monthly webinar. We'd love to co-brand a webinar

<Ian> ACTION: ltoth to work with Ian to schedule a Conexxus Webinar on Web payments (aiming for Q2 2019)

<Ian> Ken_: Question for Krystian - what do you think could be helpful to get small/medium merchants to adopt?

<Ian> Krystosterone: Small merchants will gravitate to a platform. Payment Request can be used initially as a way to get to payment methods....and if people see good results replace their entire checkout...it's tough for Shopify to hand off the whole checkout experience to the browser because we have a whole team working on it; but handing over part can be useful ...we'd like to leverage payment request for branded buttons...from a Shopify experience, use the PR API experience with those branded buttons first to add to the offering of the merchant; you also help with buyer adoption ...users have confidence in the branded buttons...they trust those buttons...once people become comfortable with PR API through branded buttons, that might help buyer adsoption

<Ian> Gildas Le Louarn slides

<Ian> Gildas: Fragmentation of Safari not doing basic card is unfortunate

<Ian> ltoth: A lot of our merchants would like to show preferences for payment methods

<Ian> IJ: We don't preclude payment methods

<Ian> ltoth: Some merchants will prefer some payment methods ...people have a preference for ACH

<Ian> IJ: NACHA has joined the group; we continue to look for ways to get more payment handler support

<Ian> [IJ Notes that there's a connection between a preference for prepaid and WPWG issue to remove supportedTypes]

<Ian> dezell: Today our customers are using this in-app...loyalty comes first...that loyalty mechanism often can determine what the user sees as preferred payment methods

<Ian> Gildas: Basic card does not address some regional specifities (e.g., France, Brazil)

<Ian> dezell: The way that cards are handled tends to change in different environments....e.g., automotiver...until the merchant has the card info, you don't know what questions to ask the customer...we have some "back and forth needs"

<Ian> Krystosterone: For small to medium merchants, a lot of them accept anything that is card related through SDKs, but that also means that a merchant doesn't need to provide PCI-DSS compliance on their site ...I am very interested in the tokenization spec as a way to help adoption

<Ian> Gildas: Tokenization and 3DS are major issues ....I think that those are important to adoption...but the approach that we are looking at today may or may not help us address PSD2 use cases

<Ian> vkuntz: Merchants need to show available payment methods up front. ...not part of the API but good to help users understand their options up front before they click buy

<Ian> IJ: I am very interested in more proactive presentation of options by the browser; even before user gesture. ...something like a PaymentRequest.showOptions() method.

<Ian> Krystosterone: You can still do a case statement in the front end..that's separate from Payment Request API

<Ian> vkuntz: It's not completely separate; banks want to send back options based on user interaction ...I expect that this merchant gets offers from my bank. PayLater group clearly wanted users to have more info about options up front

<Ian> Gildas Le Louarn slides on industry priorities

<Ian> Gildas: We would put together acquirer and PSP ...the payer...I would distinguish the "end user" from the "issuer" ...I would add issuer as a separate line item (in part to get them more involved) ...I am otherwise in agreement

<Ian> phila: To engage more people, we have an opportunity to reach out via GS1 at an event called GS1 Connect, which is a TPAC-like meeting for GS1...in Denver, CO in June 2019...you can promote the work to audiences...there are also the equivalent of WG meetings for two days after that...presentation at either event could work...the audience will not be interested in "browser" and "Web"...these APIs will need to work in apps

<Ian> dezell: Price reduction is appealing

<Ian> Krystosterone: Progressive web apps could be part of the discussion...pitch it as "best of both worlds" (PWA)...you have something web-related on your device that looks like an app

<Ian> phila: Give people a QR-code looking demo

<Ian> Ken: I believe app usage may be done, and may not always migrate from old phone to new phone

<Ian> dezell: Hard to get our merchants to look closely at technology details. The key things they want are (1) cost savings (2) increasing customer reach (3) cool factor

<Ian> [Discussion continues a bit on how best to communicate Web value proposition to various audiences]

Ian Jacobs departs

Industry Priorities

[Gildas Le Louarn slides on industry priorities]

<phila> scribenick: phila

gildas: Looking at priorities

dezell: Conversion rate means what?

Krystosterone: It's when a customer shows interest, whether they go through to completion
... Even though we're a platform, we have all of those priorities
... Ken suggested having issuers in there - makes sense to me

Ken: Distinguishing |-| priorities, what would incentivise them to move?
... we need to understand what it would take to get them to move. Even if Krystosterone's experiments had showed an amazing result, would that be enough? I guess not.
... Does carrot or stick work better? We could look at that for each category

dezell: Now?

Ken: No, but that's a task

Linda: I think we've covered what I had...
... Next Q is industry priorities - for convenience, digital offers is clearly a big one
... blockchain
... from a T&L POV... refreshing store inventories, if we're doing made to order, we need to know what's in stock.
... That's important for small stores that don't keep larges stocks of each SKU
... Fresh food is an issue - maintaining traceability for recalls is important
... A lot of merchants are doing in-app ordering but you need to go to the store to pay. They might be a good target
... a lot of in-app ordering is for food. Based on our experience, I think we'll see some other ordering things like sandwiches, pizza
... Moving people away from apps can be difficult.

dezell: We need a compelling story. There's app fatigue, but people do download apps

Linda: Our merchants give people enough of an incentive to get them to do it. Paying for gasoline is a good one.
... Connected cars might be a future but now it's mobile phone

phila: I don't think users or merchants care if it's Web or app - people just think 'phone'

dezell: MSFT is selling a system that you can put in your store like the Amazon Go experience
... I don't know where the Web plays in that
... Others are looking at XR
... We have people in our industry - you can scan the store and it tells you what's there ... Done with an AR overlay

UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Say an AR payments thing (WorldPay??)

Krystosterone: Samsung did something like that?

dezell: WorldPay had an AR credit card
... Game interfaces are going to be hot
... Think of web pages as user experiences on the holodeck

Linda: If I'm on a gluten-free diet, for example, if I can only see the things I'm safe to be able to buy

dezell: I had a question... we talked a lot about the UI. The UI was jarring for people
... In an ideal world, how should it work?

Krystosterone: From our platform perspective - we have a team on the checkout experience. Some of UX was different from what buyers are accustomed to
... There are things in the Google implementation like a greyed-out button, people don't understand they can't click on it
... A shipping address seemed to be pre-selected in Chrome but actually it wasn't
... buyer had to select one

dezell: You gave us some of the rough spots. If you had a clean slate, what would you do?

Krystosterone: The UX is the browser's concern, not the API which is ours

dezell: That's the way it's set up now, but like anything to do with the UX, if it's not working, maybe we need to decouple the UX from the API?
... Changing colours and presence might give incremental changes that weren't so jarring

Krystosterone: That's more from the merchants saying that payments weren't recognisable enough
... changing the icon, changing the colour etc. might help

dezell: A question then - if you fast-forward where every payment request has the same experience, would that mitigate the problem

Krystosterone: That would be good, yes, very much so

dezell: I typically hire UI people as it's not my speciality. It's a hard thing for programmers to step away from UI
... Not clear who's worked on browser UI

[More conversation about developer/UI designer relationship]

dezell: Any more points to bring up?
... Thanks for coming. We will let the group when the next teleconference is (by default 26 November).

[Adjourned]