By
Godfrey Benjamin
March 22nd, 2024
Apple competes with PayPal to offer the best solution for online shoppers.
Apple has made a number of exciting announcements at this week’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. One of them means that Apple finally adds an Apple Pay button to the checkout part on their sites.
Apple’s option “Pay with Apple Pay” is available only in Safari now. The purchase will be authenticated through Touch ID on the phone or watch. TechCrunch explains how the process of authentication will look like: “When you are ready to check out online, Apple’s Continuity feature will pull up a prompt on your phone or watch to quickly authentically and complete your purchase. You’ll either use Touch ID on your phone or tap your pre-authenticated watch to confirm the purchase, which will automatically process in the browser.”
Apple’s initiative primarily aims at facilitation of shopping process. Indeed, the less time you spend tracking down your credit card and finding the right security code to input, the more time you have to decide whether you really need this purchase or not.
Apple Pay is expected to provide competition to PayPal, a global online payments system. Thad Peterson, a Senior Analyst at independent research firm Aite Group, made a point of the seniority of PayPal on the market and noted that this platform has a 12-year head start on Apple Pay.
“There are already a lot of payment choices out there and merchants aren’t likely to offer every one, as it creates what is being called the ‘NASCAR effect’ where the shopping cart/pay window carries a whole bunch of different logos and choices,” said Peterson. “More likely is that merchants will select one or two that have the greatest potential to positively impact sales. I suspect that if the merchant’s offering targets users who are in the Apple/iPhone demographic, they may choose to add Apple Pay, but it will always be in addition to a card-on-file option and/or another buy button like PayPal.”
To Apple’s regret and to customers’ luck (the more offers has the market, the better), PayPal is not the only rival to Apple Pay. Last month Android unveiled its intention to make a similar API called PaymentRequest available to Web developers. Android’s PaymentRequest will also cut down friction in online checkout by offering fingerprint authentication.
It is interesting that Apple used to ignore the whole segment of online shoppers although it promotes its apps as a shopping platform. Bringing Apple Pay to the web gave Apple a possibility to offer its payment method to a wide range of shoppers who don’t shop in apps, or just prefer shopping on the web.
Despite the popularity of peer-to-peer payments nowadays, Apple did not release a peer-to-peer payments service through Apple Pay. So far, Apple didn’t provide any comments concerning the probability of making peer-to-peer payments through the company’s platform.