No Apple Pay, No Sale — oxblog
There is one button I look for when I reach an online checkout:
This button is not decoration. It is the checkout.
When it is there, I confirm the card and details already on my device,<br>authenticate and move on. Without it, the store wants my name, address and card<br>details in another form. Sometimes it also wants an account and the privilege<br>of storing my card.
No. I wanted the thing in the cart, not a clerical relationship with your<br>database.
The shortest path gets the order
Apple Pay is close enough to one click to change my behaviour. The merchant<br>receives the delivery details I authorise, but I do not have to re-enter them.<br>It also receives a device-specific account number and a transaction-specific<br>security code instead of my actual card number. That is the documented design, not a comforting little<br>shield icon beside a conventional card form.
This is not merely my impatience. In Baymard’s current cart-abandonment research,<br>17% of shoppers had recently abandoned an order because checkout was too long<br>or complicated; 19% had left because they did not trust the site with their<br>card information. In a controlled experiment, Stripe measured a 22.3% average increase in<br>conversion when Apple Pay was offered. It is the provider’s dataset, but<br>the direction is unsurprising.
Browser autofill is not equivalent. It can fail or fill the wrong field, and I<br>still inspect a form before submitting my card number. Nor will I let every<br>shop keep a card on file. Roughly once a year, an unauthorised transaction<br>forces me to replace my card and repair everything attached to it. More<br>card-on-file relationships assign me more trust and maintenance.
This is one reason I rarely buy from Core Electronics now unless it is the<br>only place with the part. Little Bird Electronics usually gets the order. The<br>products are often interchangeable; the checkout is not.
You lose more than one cart
Cart-abandonment statistics capture only the first-order damage. I may finish<br>an inconvenient checkout once because I have already chosen the product. What<br>I learn is to begin elsewhere next time. The original merchant never sees that<br>lost cart because I never return far enough to create it.
Losing one purchase is trivial. Training a frequent buyer to exclude your<br>store can redirect years of orders to a competitor.
A monopoly can get away with this. If you are the only seller with the item, I<br>will suffer through the form. Most shops are not monopolies. When another<br>seller has the same item at a similar price, checkout is part of the product<br>and the faster seller wins.
The excuse is usually gone
A custom payment stack can require merchant setup, domain verification and<br>testing. That is not the ordinary excuse for a shop using a modern provider or<br>hosted checkout. Apple tells merchants to contact their payment<br>provider. With Stripe’s hosted Checkout, Apple Pay needs no integration change and can<br>be enabled in payment-method settings.
There is no special Apple toll either. Stripe charges the same as it does for the underlying card<br>transaction. Apple Pay does not remove the ordinary card-processing fee; it<br>does not add another. If the checkout supports it, the remaining work may<br>literally be turning it on.
So turn it on. Do not make a willing customer transcribe information, expose a<br>card number or establish an account merely to give you money. They may tolerate<br>it today. The consequential decision is where they shop first next time.