Consumers create trends; businesses then scurry to catch up. As shoppers increasingly moved online in recent years, retailers raced to accommodate them.
Yet in all the frenzied activity—including an influx of alternative payment methods to cater to cash users wanting to go online—the fundamentals of card payments were largely untouched.
Superficially it might appear that retailers, payment service providers (PSPs) and even issuing banks largely took cards for granted. Card payments were not going anywhere, and—unlike cash—they already worked online.
The story played out rather differently offline.
Card issuers, PSPs and retailers rallied around a contactless standard to allow consumers to tap cards to make quick in-store payments that often displaced cash use. The convenience of a secure tap-and-go payment contributed to better shopping experiences with shorter wait times and—in the wake of Covid-19—allayed concerns around cleanliness.
Worldwide, 44% of consumers claim to have made a contactless card payment in the past year instead of inserting or swiping, and half of them claim to have increased usage of such cards, according to the Mastercard New Payments Index (NPI) from March–April 2022.
Meanwhile, despite huge e-commerce growth due to Covid-19, the newfound convenience and consistency offline did not make its way online. A closer look shows the cause was less about neglect and more about complications specific to e-commerce around fragmented technology and the manual entry of card details at checkout. But when 64% of respondents to the NPI survey say they are likely to make an online payment via the manual entry of card details over the next year, it is time for the benefits of offline taps to come to online clicks.
The future of e-commerce now increasingly depends on issuers, PSPs and retailers rallying around a secure online one-click checkout standard in the same way they rallied around a secure offline contactless standard. Click to Pay, the consumer-facing name for EMVCo’s EMV secure remote commerce (SRC) specifications, provides that standard. It obviates the need for passwords and provides a consistent checkout experience across devices, operating systems and retailers without making consumers re-enter information.
With Mastercard Data & Services’ Click to Pay solution, clients will benefit from:
End-to-end support launching and optimizing Click to Pay
Lower cart abandonment through convenient and secure check out process
Reduced e-commerce fraud and compliance costs
Improved merchant and consumer payment flexibility
