Every year, billions of dollars vanish at the final step of online shopping, not because consumers change their minds, but because of hurdles within the checkout experience. Despite decades of innovation in payments technology, many shoppers still walk away when checkout feels slow or overly complex, costing businesses an estimated $260 billion annually.
The answer may lie in the growing influence of developers as companies build embedded payment platforms. In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Bryan Long, Senior Director of Product Management at North, and Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed how developers are driving innovation—and actively solving checkout challenges—for online retailers.
Managing Friction
Today’s e-commerce ecosystem reveals a widening gap between shoppers and merchants. Consumers expect a seamless experience: fast product discovery, strong brand trust, and checkout convenience features like one-click checkout, intelligent form filling, and address autocomplete. Meanwhile, merchants and the independent software vendors (ISVs) that power point-of-sale systems need data access and security, without sacrificing conversation rates.
“Address autocomplete or one-click payment buttons are not just conveniences for merchants,” said Long. “I think of them as friction management. Every extra field that a user has to fill out lowers conversion and results in decreased sales.”
Some platforms attempt to bridge this gap with guest checkout solutions. Shopify, for example, allows customers to complete purchases in a single click using stored credentials. While convenient, this approach can limit a retailer’s ability to collect customer data such as email addresses and shipping details.
Additionally, redirecting shoppers to a third-party payment gateway—often with a different URL—can undermine brand trust and introduce friction at the most critical moment of the purchase journey.
“For me, it sets off all these subconscious alarm bells. Is data security an issue here? It feels like the page has been taken over by hackers,” Long said. “As a product person, it’s really bad product design especially when a shopper is about to divulge their most personal data.”
The Benefits of Embedded Payments
Embedded payments provide a more comprehensive solution. They allow businesses to own the checkout experience, keeping customers on the merchant’s site through the transaction while delivering a fully branded, customizable flow. The result is lower churn, higher conversion rates, and increased revenue.
By enabling one-click checkout and supporting popular wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, embedded payments reduce cart abandonment. Features such as address autocomplete and intuitive form design further streamline data entry, cutting down checkout time and customer frustration.
“The tech has evolved so much just in the last couple of years to meet all those points that reduce the friction, protect the data, and deliver that stellar user experience,” said Apgar. “But the fact of the matter is most merchants, when they spool up their e-commerce site and pick a payments provider, they implement the tech that’s available and never revisit it. Many sites are using outdated technology simply because that was the best that they could find at the time.”
As cart abandonment rates remain stubbornly high, businesses are reevaluating legacy payment processors and increasingly opting for fintech-driven solutions. While switching costs exist, many organizations are finding the integration effort well worth the payoff.
Developers as Decision Makers
Over the past five to seven years, another major shift has reshaped the payments landscape: developers have become key decision makers. If a product introduces too much friction—whether in APIs, documentations, or integration complexity—developers will simply abandon it and advise business owners to do the same.
“What we’re really seeing is developers having become first-class citizens,” Long said. “It’s an add-on, self-service for developers is sales. In 2026, a salesperson is often times not your first point of contact—the API documentation is.”
“That’s why we build product functionality for developers,” he said. “Providing a unified sandbox that mirrors production allows developers to test end-to-end in system integration without having to wait for a sales call. Giving developers access to API logs and code samples also improves the integration experience and cuts down on the time to integrate, which is faster speed to revenue.”
When embedded payment strategies are paired with well-architected, API-first platforms, partner integration timelines can shrink from months to weeks. This cycle builds trust with developers and improves brand credibility. At the end of the day, developer experience is not just about having polished documentation—it’s a revenue engine.
“I’m seeing more specific solutions as opposed to just building a SaaS product for one industry now,” said Long. “It’s getting more verticalized and specific to merchants, individual use cases and needs. Finding a solution to help drive your business is becoming easier, and that’s all due to the rise of the developer as a decision maker.”
The Rise of Agentic Commerce
That focus on developer experience is now colliding with an even bigger shift—software is no longer built solely for humans to operate. Increasingly, it’s being built for other software to reason over, act on, and transact with autonomously. As AI systems move from passive tools to active decision-makers, the same API-first principles that won over developers are becoming foundational for a new class of users—AI agents.
One of the most transformative trends in payments today is agentic commerce, where AI agents handle every stage of the transaction. Research suggests that within the next few years, more digital commerce transactions will be initiated by AI bots rather than humans.
This shift makes API-first embedded payments not just an advantage, but a requirement for survival. In an agentic commerce environment, checkout flows must be readable and executable by machines, not just optimized for human users. Merchants must deliver streamlined experiences while also ensuring their systems are discoverable, secure, and transactable by AI.
“It’s a complex landscape and it’s getting more complex as the tech advances,” Apgar said. “Merchants really need to find a payments partner with a strong catalog of payment options that’s well organized and deliverable in a seamless fashion. The developer is now a first-class citizen, not a support ticket.”
Long added: “In the end, payments should not just be thought of as a destination that the customer travels to. It should be a seamless layer of the experience that the shopper is having. So whether the shopper is a person on the web or it’s an AI agent in the cloud, the goal is still the same, which is zero friction between purchase intent and ownership.”
