In an earlier post, What Does the Future E-commerce Checkout Page have in Common with a Race Car?, I pondered the idea of merchants loading up the checkout page with different payments types. My basic premise is that providing too many payment options can be as damaging as offering too few. I’ve been told by many in the e-commerce field that the checkout page is the most important page on the website because that’s where most cart abandonment happens. Therefore changes to the checkout page need to be very carefully thought out.
I recently read an article on the Financial Post, which made me think again do we need another payment choice? According to the article, American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa to Power Global Expansion of Simple, Consistent Digital Checkout Experience, the four big networks have teamed up with EMVCO to, well, as the title says, offer a new payment option to online shoppers. The new payment option, which was announced in October 2019, is called “Click to Pay” and shows up on checkout pages as:
Consumers can now register with Click to Pay, allowing it to use device and location information, along with card information to easily and safely transact.
Click to Pay aims to make the online checkout simple and secure for consumers across web and mobile sites, mobile apps and connected devices by replacing time-consuming key entry of personal account numbers and information at checkout. The advanced digital checkout solution mirrors the consistent, interoperable checkout experience in physical stores – with one terminal to accept all card payments. Consistent with the goal of interoperability, the vision for the future is that Click to Pay will provide consumers a streamlined experience across any digital checkout environment or network.
It is important to note that some of the payment networks have tried something like this themselves in the not-too-distant past with limited success. The reason for the limited success, in my opinion, is first a lack of consumer awareness and understanding. More importantly, however, do solutions like these actually solve a problem for consumers in such a way that it will promote widespread adoption?
Successful products and services solve a problem and will this solve the “problem” of card on file or manual entering of payment and billing info? I guess only time will tell. For the merchants the promise is reduced cart abandonment rates and for the issuers and networks (and merchants) it promises reduced fraud. I get that.
That gets me back to the whole checkout page issue. What does a checkout page cluttered with payment options look like? Will it look like a modern day race car covered in logos? The jury is still out on how the online shopper will react to Click to Pay, and all the other payment options that merchants are putting on their websites. We’ll need a behavioral economist to spell it all out for us.
Overview by Peter Reville, Director, Primary Research Services at Mercator Advisory Group
