Digital wallet (Apple Pay, Google Pay)
What is a digital wallet (Apple Pay, Google Pay)?
A digital wallet (Apple Pay, Google Pay) keeps a buyer’s cards on their phone or in their account. Paying takes one confirmation: a face scan, a fingerprint or the device passcode. In an online shop the wallet is a button at the payment step. Nobody types a card number, and the money still travels through the shop’s own payment provider as a card payment.
Example
Take a cosmetics shop that gets 70% of its visits from phones. At the payment step a mobile buyer types sixteen digits, an expiry date and a security code, then approves the payment in their banking app or with a code sent by SMS. Say that in a month 500 mobile buyers reach the card form and 90 of them never finish.
With an Apple Pay or Google Pay button, the same buyer taps once and confirms with a face scan or a fingerprint. If the button wins back just 15 of those 90 orders at an average of €40, that is €600 of turnover a month from visitors the shop already had. The figures are illustrative; the real effect shows when you compare the mobile conversion rate before and after the button goes live.
Why it matters for a business
On a phone every form field is a reason to leave, and the card is often in another room. A wallet removes the typing, and usually the separate 3-D Secure step as well: the buyer has already proved who they are on their own device, and that counts as strong customer authentication. The card number is never entered on the shop’s page — what leaves the wallet is an encrypted package for the provider.
The button only appears for buyers whose device and browser support that wallet. Everyone else sees the usual card form, so a wallet adds a faster lane rather than replacing card payment. Fees are usually the same as for a card payment, but check that in your provider’s contract instead of assuming it.
A wallet usually needs no new contract: it is switched on inside the card payment you already have with your bank or payment provider. In the online stores we build, cards run through the payment provider you choose — Stripe (as at Muzelo), your bank’s virtual POS or any other — and Apple Pay and Google Pay are part of that module.
What to ask
- Does your payment provider or bank support Apple Pay and Google Pay, and on what terms?
- Who registers the shop’s domain with the provider? Without that registration, Apple Pay does not appear.
- Can the button show in the basket or on the product page, or only at the last step?
- How are refunds handled: back along the same route as a card refund?
- Do your reports count wallet payments separately, so you can see whether the button changed anything?