overview_revision_2018

Status: This is a scratchpad for Adrian, Nick, and Ian to take notes on a revision to the Web Payments Overview specification.

Introduction

Although the Web supports trillions of dollars of e-commerce annually, making purchases on the web, particularly from a mobile device, can be a frustrating experience. Every web site has its own flow, and most require users to manually type in the same addresses, contact information, and payment credentials again and again. This can lead to shopping cart abandonment and lost customer loyalty. Users face other types of friction as well, including very different experiences from site to site, and potentially confusing redirects from e-commerce sites to payment sites. For e-commerce site owners, it can be difficult and time-consuming to create and maintain checkout pages that support a growing number of payment methods.

To address these issues the W3C community is specifying new Web capabilities to streamline checkout and enhance security. These include:

• Enabling e-commerce sites to request stored payment credentials and related information (shipping addresses, billing addresses, and contact information) through an optimized browser-based user experience. This browser-based user experience replaces traditional checkout forms. The new browser experience allows the user to quickly access information (such as shipping addresses) stored by the browser.
• Extending the streamlined payment experience to include third party payment handlers (digital wallets). When the e-commerce site accepts a payment method and the user has a corresponding payment handler, the browser makes it easy to launch and interact with the payment handler to complete a payment. This standard hook makes it easier to bring new (and potentially more secure) payment methods to the Web.
• Increasing payment security by leveraging advances in tokenization and strong authentication.

Impact on the Payments Ecosystem

Section heading ideas

• Introduction/Problem statement
• How it works
• Stakeholders
• Terminology
• Flows
• Implementation status
• Next steps / active work
• Related work (at W3C or elsewhere)
• Bibliography / Resources