What Is Click-to-Pay – And Is It Secure?

More and more people are gravitating towards online checkout experiences. As a result, the digital payment landscape is rapidly evolving. In response, merchants and payment providers are continuously looking for ways to improve the customer experience and increase sales.

Introducing Click-to-Pay

The four credit card giants – Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover – have recently partnered up to create a click-to-pay option for online shopping sites. The feature aims to offer a more convenient way to checkout online, without the need for entering one’s credit card information. But what exactly does this feature provide – and how secure is it?

From a customer experience standpoint, the click-to-pay button is most similar to the checkout process of PayPal. The customer logs into the payment account, which then gets linked up to the retailer to withdraw the payment.

When ready to start the click-to-pay payment process on your merchant’s website, look for the symbol below:

As a shopper, you don’t have to enter your credit card number by number, or even have it saved in the browser. Click-to-pay requires consumers to enter card details just one time rather than on a per-transaction basis. This means customers do not have to go through the process of setting up individual ‘guest’ accounts and entering personal information on the website of each merchant.

Click-to-Pay Is Secure

The click-to-pay technology follows the EMV Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) industry standard. This is a set of specifications that EMVco developed. EMVco is a consortium of Europay, Mastercard & Visa. These organisations are the same team that introduced the 3DSecure system on online checkouts and invented ‘chip & pin’ technologies.

The EMV SRC standard provides a foundation that will enable industry solutions for the processing of e-commerce transactions in a consistent fashion across a variety of consumer devices. From smartphones to tablets and PCs to other connected devices, the standard comes in handy.

Click-to-pay doesn’t just provide a more convenient and streamlined customer experience. It also limits the exposure of a consumer’s card details when making one-time purchases. Therefore, it is a more secure option when compared to the manual entry of credit card details online.

Happier Customers and Increased Sales

Arguably, the merchants implementing click-to-pay on their websites not only benefit from a happier customer, but from increased sales as well. Data from the Baymard Institute suggests that 70% of online shoppers abandon their carts before finalising the standard checkout process. With click-to-pay buttons eliminating the need for manual card data entry, merchants can expect to see the cart abandonment rate drastically decrease. Customers will have less time to change their mind about the transaction.

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