The Apple Pay Safari Vs. PayPal Battle For Web Transactions Is An Invalid Argument.
With the release of Apple Pay for Safari on macOS and iOS there is a natural debate that arises about Apple's new 1-click payment system supplanting PayPal’s payment platform. To a very small degree this may turn out to be correct. However this will only be because of indirect effects of consumers using and adopting Apple Pay as a preferred payment and web order form completion system.
The primary foe Apple is aiming at is the hand keying of payment card data, addresses, email, phone, etc. into sometimes very tiny and none uniform web order forms. This foe is the cognitive and mechanical load required for the customer to some times hand type 100s of characters in to small screens or even larger screens of macOS computers.
Thus the real battle is Apple Pay Safari vs. web order forms. This battle is to make the check out experience almost identical to the simplistic checkout experience many have come to know from Apple Pay at retail locations.
I wrote about this last week and said Apple Pay for Safari is like the Amazon 1-Click system for the entire web [1]. In some ways Apple Pay Safari may have a somewhat more pronounced impact to Amazon as smaller websites can duplicated the 1-Click fast checkout system that has been a huge advantage to the company. This will tilt to some degree to higher sales to smaller merchants because of zero barriers to checkout.
In my early testing I can confirm that the checkout abandonment rate for websites that use Apple Pay Safari will be reduced significantly. The nebulous shopping cart systems that frustrate potential customers will effectively disappear as each product displayed will be able to be 1-click from completing a sale.
Thus there really is only one battle Apple is engaged in, that is making the web a uniform and efficient “master shopping cart” with a highly secured and fast way to pay.
I am 100% certain that there are no real losers in this battle and ultimately everyone wins.
