Accepting Apple Pay in Your Ecommerce Store
Apple Pay is the native digital wallet that ships installed on all new Apple devices, and it is quickly becoming one of the most important payment methods in the online shopping space. Connecting with today’s online consumer is all about the experience. A clunky, difficult shopping experience will result in high bounce rates and lost sales, while a seamless, efficient, and enjoyable one will generate happy, loyal customers. That’s what Apple Pay is all about. While digital wallets are offered by all the major mobile device companies, including Google and Samsung, Apple Pay is the undisputed leader and the one online merchants need to have to keep their customers happy.
How Apple Pay Works
Apple Pay works by creating a parallel payment channel alongside your traditional checkout. Users have the option of using either system. Any time they decide to checkout using Apple Pay, effectively the entire traditional chain of shopping cart, checkout screen, and payment entry is bypassed. Bypassing each of those steps is possible because it has all of the necessary data pre-stored on the user’s device and ready to go, much like a customer’s account might pre-store payment data on a site like Amazon. In essence, it provides customers with the kind of express checkout they’d normally have to log in for, without the need to log in.
Once a user clicks the button, all they have to do to complete their transaction is swipe their thumb across their device’s Touch ID or do a quick face scan with Face ID, and the purchase is complete. What would ordinarily take minutes can instead be done in seconds. In some cases where purchases exceed a certain value, card issuers may require users to enter a pin as well. Even in those cases, the checkout and payment process is far more streamlined than the vast majority of online shopping carts can offer.
Why Accepting Apple Pay is So Important
Apple Pay has been around for years, and for a long time, it was somewhat of a novelty. Today, it is exploding in popularity and is now an absolute must for all merchants looking to provide their customers with the best shopping experience possible. The primary reasons online consumers are demanding Apple Pay in 2021 are convenience and security – two areas that are major drivers of online shopping behavior and two areas in which it dominates.
Apple Pay is arguably the most convenient online payment option on the market today because of its speed and its availability. Online juggernauts like Amazon offer one-click buying for logged-in users, but Apple Pay essentially extends that same speed and convenience to any store that enables digital wallet payments, allowing even the smallest merchants to compete with the giants of ecommerce on the user experience front. Because it is installed out-of-the-box on every iPhone, iPad, and Macbook, it has an enormous built-in user base – one growing so quickly that some estimates see Apple Pay owning 10% of all card transactions – both online and off – by 2025. With no additional fees to use, tapping into a user base like that is an easy choice for most merchants.
The other big benefit for online shoppers is heightened security. While most consumers today are fairly at ease entering their credit card details online, fraud is still a huge and extremely costly problem. The biometric Touch ID and Face ID security checks all but eliminate the potential for fraud, offering peace of mind to business owners and consumers, especially ones concerned with the idea of their sensitive payment data being stored by anyone but themselves.
How to Offer Apple Pay on An Ecommerce Store
The good news for merchants looking to offer Apple Pay is that ecommerce platforms understand its importance, and many are now building it in as a stock feature. Merchants using some of the most popular ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Shopify, can enable Apple Pay by simply going into their backends and selecting it as an available payment method. A button will then automatically appear alongside the standard checkout options on product and cart pages.
Merchants using some legacy systems and more complex, customizable systems like Magento don’t have it quite so easy, as Apple Pay may not be a stock integration. However, in those cases, there are often third-party plugins which use a payment gateway ready to quickly integrate, like IWD Apple Pay for Magneto 2.
Merchants unsure of the best way to integrate Apple Pay with their ecommerce sites can reach out to their merchant services providers for guidance on how to get started. BAMS merchants can integrate their merchant accounts with a wide variety of ecommerce platforms ready to accept Apple Pay with the flip of a switch. Better yet, the BAMS interchange-plus pricing model offers the lowest and most transparent transaction fees in the industry, which, combined with Apple Pay’s zero-fee checkout, makes BAMS and Apple Pay the ultimate online payment solution.
For more information on how a BAMS merchant account can help you save money and streamline your customers’ shopping experience, start your free five-point price comparison today.