By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 23rd, 2024
Visa, Discover, Mastercard, and American Express have introduced a single payment button for checkout.
In what seems to be one of the biggest challenges to online payment processors such as Paypal, Apple Pay and a whole host of others, the biggest guns in credit card processing have decided to team up and implement their own single button-based checkout process. American Express, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover have decided to join forces to make checkout easier for consumers.
Based on what the card industry refers to as Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) which is a singular checkout process for any cardholder of the above payment processors to reduce the rate at which many shoppers stop shopping online due to their reluctance to share their details with the various mid-range merchants based on security concerns.
With other mid-level solutions that exist such as the 3d Secure and others, the initiative is aimed at making the checkout process to be based on a one-click procedure that is similar to e-payment services. Already, Rakuten, Cinemark, and Movember have put the checkout button on their websites with other retailers to follow (BassPro, JoAnn Fabric, and Crafts, Papa John’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, SHOP.com and Tickets.com) at the years end.
According to sources, the aim of the credit card processors is to make the checkout process simpler.
Jess Turner, Mastercard’s executive vice president of product and innovation for North America said in a comment about inclusion of one single button for check out that [it is] “…allowing the consumer to go through a guest checkout experience with very limited friction and no static password to remember,”
As it stands, there are so many options that are displayed on the checkout sections of many websites. This has led to so much confusion and so many lost sales as many online shoppers simply become confused and leave the sites leading to lost revenues. The new concept referred to as “Click to pay” intends to change all this and capture a significant portion of these lost sales.
As a new concept, though novel will present a challenge to online payment services providers and even the US Anti-trust movement which has been active in other areas of the technology industry lately.
How the credit card giants and the payment processors intend to sort out their differences remains unclear. What is clear however is that the credit-card companies want a larger piece of the internet retail market and they are doing everything they can to get it.
Be that as it may, they may not be able to fully take over this market as the government regulators are on one hand taking a deep look at technology companies and the electronic payment processors, on the other hand, won’t let them.