The payments landscape is one of rapid changes and developments. The COVID pandemic is still influencing many areas, leading to an increased number of solutions and services that ecommerce businesses have at their disposal. One of these solutions that have risen in the wake of the pandemic is digital wallets.
One of the main players in the digital wallets market is Apple. All the Apple users have access to Apple’s innovative, highly customer-friendly digital wallet. With the emphasis on a frictionless user experience, Apple Pay has revolutionized the customer journey for online shopping.
In the next paragraphs, we’ll dive deeper into what Apple Pay specifically can offer your webshop.
Apple Pay, everything you need to know
What are Apple Pay’s main advantages, and how easy is it for the consumer to pay with Apple Pay? Also, how safe is the payment method?
We’ll answer these questions and more below.
How to integrate Apple Pay
If you’re looking to offer your customers a straightforward, innovative shopping experience, Apple Pay is the answer. You can easily activate Apple Pay through your payment service provider. After activation, you can choose to integrate Apple Pay in several ways.
We’ll highlight all three of these variations below:
Hosted (Redirect)
As with most payment methods, you can offer Apple Pay through a hosted payment solution. A hosted solution redirects consumers to a payment page provided by MultiSafepay. The consumer authenticates with Apple Pay, carries out the payment, and gets redirected back to the webshop environment.
Embedded (Direct)
There’s also an option to integrate Apple Pay into your webshop directly.
Using an embedded component, you add an Apple Pay button directly in your checkout, allowing the consumer to authenticate and carry out the payment directly from your website. A direct integration cuts out the payment page in the example above and can provide a more frictionless payment experience.
Product page (Direct)
The last option is one of the prime innovations that Apple Pay offers. Instead of displaying the Apple Pay button from the previous example in your checkout, you can also move it to the product page.
Imagine a customer browsing your website and seeing what they want; once they click on the product, they are presented with a ‘Buy with Apple Pay’ button, which lets them buy the product directly off your product page - cutting out the checkout procedure entirely. Check out our other article on this here.
(This integration method is not available for every platform)
The advantages of Apple Pay
First and foremost, Apple Pay offers its users simplicity. By automatically and securely storing the customer’s data, Apple Pay makes authentication easy and fast. The integrated biometrics feature on Apple devices plays a vital part in this, as the customer’s fingerprint is used to approve the payment. With the increasing competitiveness in ecommerce, adding payments such as Apple Pay and keeping up with the latest trends is essential for your success. Apple Pay is also used to process recurring payments, which is no surprise when looking at its safety standards. Apple Pay encrypts and saves sensitive data through tokenization, which is crucial in creating a safe repeat purchase process.
The above features become even more critical when the shopper is on a mobile device. One of the leading global trends in ecommerce is ‘m-commerce’ which, according to forecasts by Insider Intelligence, will reach a value of $728.28 billion in turnover by 2025, accounting for roughly 44% of online sales in the United States.
If you own a webshop, you can’t ignore the opportunity that Apple Pay offers. The speed and simplicity you can offer your customers can make the difference between a successful purchase and an abandoned cart.
How Apple Pay works for the consumer
More great news for Apple users (and business with an off- and online presence): Apple Pay can also be used in physical locations. Apple has been steadily expanding its offering when it comes to Apple Pay, now offering physical and online payments, with plenty more features on the horizon.
Consumers must first configure their Apple Pay app by adding their preferred cards to the Apple Wallet. Configuration is quite simple and possible from all Apple devices.
Online payments are carried out through one of the methods described above and are authorized by scanning biometrics and confirming. Physical payments are made in contactless mode by using NFC technology. Once the device is close enough, the consumer approves the transaction with biometrics, after which it is processed.
Are Apple Pay payments secure?
If you’ve any doubt about the security of Apple Pay, you can rest easy. The tech giant’s payment method is among the top of the market regarding security. Its biometric features in its authentication process make it extremely difficult for criminals to commit fraud using Apple Pay.
As we mentioned before, the sensitive data that Apple Pay uses is tokenized. Which means it’s encrypted and safely stored in a vault. Once the payment is initiated, the merchant (you) receives a token from Apple that corresponds with the data in the vault. This process means you’re not handling sensitive data, and in case of a data leak, the criminals only have access to tokens without the vault, rendering them useless.
You can find more information on privacy and security management on Apple’s official website.
Apple Pay and beyond: the other digital wallets on the market
Apple Pay in a nutshell: safe, customer-friendly, easy to integrate, and easy to use. These terms define Apple Pay and some of its competitors in the digital wallet landscape.
Next to Apple Pay, we remind you, you can also count on the reliability and flexibility of Google Pay, Alipay, and WeChat Pay. Different solutions to meet specific needs while maintaining a common denominator of essential primary features and functionality. Google Pay offers many of the same advantages as Apple Pay for Android users. In comparison, Alipay and WeChat Pay focus more on the Chinese consumer.
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