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Detecting Payment Method Availability

Background

We’ve heard very strong feedback from merchants that they would like to know before calling show() on PaymentRequest if a user has an available way to pay.

Our initial response to this feedback was to call .show() and, if it throws, fall back to an existing checkout flow. This, however, has created challenges. Two are worth highlighting:

  • Some merchants would like to use PaymentRequest as an abbreviated checkout of sorts, thus forgoing things like coupon codes, etc. Put in a more direct way: they would like to directly replace the Apple Pay button, whose appearance is determined by a canMakePaymentsWithActiveCard function. But this is only worth doing if a form of payment is already available inside of PaymentRequest (otherwise, overall benefit is reduced).
  • Some merchants are interested in using PaymentRequest when a payment method is available, but otherwise would prefer their own flow.

Proposal

We add a new method onto PaymentRequest, canMakeActivePayment(), that returns back a Boolean indicating whether or not the user has the ability to make a payment at the time show() is called.

This will be a Promise.

pr.canMakeActivePayment()
  .then((result) => { if (result) return pr.show(); })
  .catch(error => { console.log(error); });

We would still prefer that merchants not be able to simply iterate through the entire set of payment methods and determine availability for privacy reasons. As such, canMakeActivePayment will be limited in the following way:

  • canMakeActivePayment can only be called once per top-level domain in a 30-minute window
  • canMakeActivePayment can be called multiple times within 30-minute window if the set of payment methods is the same

We would, however, be accepting that payment requests that are instantiated with only a single form of payment available would leak whether or now that single form of payment was available. This does not strike me as overly problematic, even if not ideal.

Scenarios

Here I have tried to outline the different scenarios that we've heard requested from merchants and indicate whether or not these use cases would be met by the proposal.

1. Only leverage PaymentRequest when a user has a form of payment available

Support: Yes

2. Only call PaymentRequest if a certain payment method is available

Support: Partial

This could be done in cases where you were only checking against a single payment method.

3. Brand payment buttons directly (e.g. Pay With BobPay)

Support: Partial

4. Brand multiple buttons that each leverage PaymentRequest with a single payment method

Support: No

Well, they could do it, but there would be no guarantee that it would work.