Future of (mobile) e-commerce payments?
Everyone by now has probably been confronted by the newly announced products of Apple. Either by means of the news on TV, your colleagues or by following yesterdays Keynote via the available live stream.
With the introduction of Apple Pay and some recent announcements Apple did at the WWDC, the company might have the chance to change the way we currently experience e-commerce payments.
The three main products Apple introduced are the new iPhones, Apple Pay and of course the Apple Watch. And also iOS8, announced at the WWDC in June, will ship with the new iPhones and Apple Watch. Obviously a new feature of iOS8 was not uncovered during the WWDC last June: Apple Pay, as well as the ability to approve payments right from your Apple Watch — a product that was only rumoured about back then.
Now lets go back a couple of months and have a look at what more was introduced at the last WWDC in June: lots of features for developers and the announcement of both iOS8 and OSX Yosemite. When looking at these software developments, combined with yesterdays revelation of Apple Pay we can see something very interesting come to light. The image below shows us the ‘seamless’ integration of iOS and OSX.
It shows us something interesting: an answer screen on both the MacBook, as well as the iPad — next to the iPhone of course. Obviously Apple is investing in an ecosystem that connects their different devices and offering a unified experience where any feature can be accessed from any of your (Apple) devices. Not only iOS-to-OSX, but also iOS-to-iOS, the Apple Watch being the latest device added to the ecosystem.
With the introduction of Apple Pay on iPhone, one could argue the next step for Apple will be to add this feature to the iPad as well. However, this might not be as logical as it sounds; the iPad is not a digital wallet — the Passbook app, for example, is not available on iPad.
So what will Apple do to make (e-commerce) payments less painful on iPad as well as the Mac? Purchases from the App Store on the Mac and iPad are already less complicated because of iCloud. But what about purchases from desktop apps bought from the App Store, and eventually even e-commerce websites?
Why wouldn’t Apple allow using Apple Pay and iPhone as a painless wallet for Mac as well as iPad, for ones everyday e-commerce purchases?
With the integration of different iOS and OSX products in OSX Yosemite, and the introduction of Apple Pay, this to me seems like a very logical next step. It will allow the company to relieve the pain of payment not only on your iPhone and in retail stores using NFC, but also on other e-commerce channels from your other connected devices.
Will Apple support payments from the browser?
As everyone has seen with the introduction of Apple Pay, the company also announced support for Apple Pay in the iOS SDK. And some payment service providers, such as Stripe, have been working with Apple to provide early support. Apple obviously encourages App creators to implement their payment method.
What the Cupertino based company didn’t show however, was support for payments in the web browser Safari. We only saw screenshots of in-app payments.
Isn’t there a huge opportunity for Apple to enable Apple Pay payments from any e-commerce website?
I suspect Apple currently only allows Apple Pay in their apps because of their governance of the App Store. Every single app that has implemented Apple Pay, will be reviewed by Apple itself, giving them the chance to block the bad guys from smearing their name, as well as maintaining control over their potential disruptive payment product.
With websites, this type of governance is a bit harder. But nothing that conventional payment service providers don’t already do. So why wouldn’t Apple?
