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Should your e-commerce site add Apple Pay as a payment option?

During routine visits to your local supermarket, you have probably grown accustomed to seeing people fish out their iPhone at the checkout, hold it poised in front of the payment terminal and… that’s seemingly it. The payment goes through as though the phone is a contactless card.

It’s a wonderfully frictionless experience, and you may not have realised that it is available in a slightly different form for e-commerce sites. This begs the question: should you add it to yours?

What is Apple Pay?

Apple Pay is among the flurry of mobile payment services – or “mobile wallets”, as you may have heard them termed – which have emerged in recent years. Services like Google Pay and Samsung Pay have ridden on Apple’s coattails in this market’s transition to the mainstream.

In a bricks-and-mortar retail store, Apple Pay works largely as we have described it – except that the user is required to authenticate the payment by resting their fingerprint on the device’s “Touch ID” scanner. With each transaction, Apple Pay also shares a one-use token rather than card details.

These measures have strengthened the security of Apple Pay compared to that of the traditional chip-and-PIN method or even using a contactless card directly. Both of these layers of security with Apple Pay also apply when using it to finalise payment on an e-commerce site. The user just taps a provided “Pay with Apple Pay” button before using Touch ID to authenticate the payment.

The wonderful simplicity of using Apple Pay online

Has your e-commerce site been blighted by the lingering issue of checkout churn – in other words, users reaching as far as your website’s checkout only to then abandon purchasing? It can be little wonder if your site’s ordering process requires the user to fill in one online form after another.

This can be especially cumbersome for people who don’t shop at your site too often or have never shopped there before. Also, while typing the likes of delivery and billing addresses and payment card details into forms can feel time-draining enough on a desktop computer, imagine how awkward it can be on a mobile device, where the user would rely on the smaller on-screen keyboard.

However, when an iPhone user taps that “Pay with Apple Pay” button, they will quickly be presented with a digital form that includes their card details, postal address and email address already. That just leaves them to put their finger on the Touch ID scanner for an easy purchasing method.

Consider implementing Apple Pay on your e-commerce site

With the same functionality available on iPads and Macs, you probably shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to more easily tap into the especially high spending power of Apple users. Apple’s website includes guidance for e-commerce webmasters looking to implement Apple Pay.

Still, if your e-commerce site is significantly struggling, resist seeing Apple Pay as a silver bullet. We can overhaul your e-commerce site if it calls for this; please phone us on 01325 582112 for further details.

Should your e-commerce site add Apple Pay as a payment option
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