Merchant Adoption, the Next Goal

I’m happy about the progress the Web Payments Working Group made in 2017, including:

• Payment Request API adoption by all major browsers and in a growing number of SDKs including Shopify, Stripe, and Braintree.
• A nearly complete test suite for Payment Request that has already helped improve the quality of implementations and will increase consistency across browsers.
• Early implementation in Chrome of the draft Payment Handler API, enabling payments from Web apps. Mozilla has begun to focus on the specification, another great development.
• First Public Working Draft of Payment Method Manifest, which enables payment method owners fine-grained control over the payment app ecosystem for their payment method, to improve security.
• Productive discussions and early documentation to improve security through encryption, network tokenization, and 3D Secure.
• A growing number payment methods brought to the ecosystem, including credit transfers and interledger payments, as well as proprietary payment methods.
• Early proposals for new Payment Request features. These are partly reflected in a proposal for the group’s next charter.

Many thanks to participants of the Web Payments Working Group for their great work this year!

We anticipate broad deployment of browsers that support Payment Request by mid-2018. Merchants and merchant service providers should already be experimenting and adopting Payment Request API in anticipation of broad browser support. If you think there are things we need to be doing to ease adoption, please let us know.

Many people, including myself, are eager for evidence that merchants who adopt Payment Request API see increased conversions (that is, less cart abandonment). Early reports are promising, but our experience is still limited. If you have begun to experiment with Payment Request API, I’d love to hear success stories as well as obstacles you encountered.

For developers, we have created a portal that includes links to introductions, code examples for various checkout scenarios, and links to developer guides. I’m particularly interested adding more code samples for common checkout patterns to the wiki; let me know if you have some to share.

We have also done some early work on a visual identity so that users can recognize and embrace the Payment Request experience across sites.

We have a lot on our Web payments plate in 2018, especially in support of merchant adoption. I invite you to join us.