W3C Web Payments Standard interoperability

Developers PoyntOS and SDK
#1

I am the co-chair for the Web Payments Working Group at the W3C who are currently working on a standard for payment initiation on the Web.

Our charter is here: http://www.w3.org/Payments/WG/charter-201510.html

In short, we want to standardise a message flow between a merchant website and the payer’s payment application (sometime called a digital wallet) and offer a browser API for merchant sites to initiate this flow.

This work is primarily based at online payments but there are some interesting omni-channel use cases that may be possible on the POYNT device.

Merchants could host their catalogue in a standard e-commerce website that could be browsed from the device and when it came time to check-out the payment flow was picked up by the POYNT SDK so that the user could make a physical payment on the terminal.

Does this use case appeal to any of the POYNT developers (especially those who also develop e-commerce products)?

Does the POYNT device allow regular web browsing? If so, what browser does it use?

#2

Thanks Adrian. Very interesting work. Looking forward to seeing more coming out of the WG.

It’s kind of outdated now but back in 2010 we did propose something similar http://www.slideshare.net/ppalavilli/open-web-payments. Hence my interest in your work.

With respect to the use case you’ve mentioned - I would let others to comment too but we are definitely seeing both native and mobile web based apps (mainly POS apps) on the device. So it would be interesting how you would bridge online and offline on the device itself. From Poynt side have provided a few ways to invoke payment flows from an external system. So technically it’s possible - how you would add it as an extension to your proposed standards would be very interesting.

Keep us posted.
cheers,
Praveen

#3

I think the use case of bridging online experience to offline space is super cool. Like on websites, we always get form auto completion, cookies to make the experience more personalized, but that experience is lost in the offline space, but technically possible.

For payment, there is a wide range of users who want to pay in store ( plastic card, NFC, apple pay), then you also have another group of users who want to pre-pay. We have done regular research in this space. Starbucks app, the previous experience is order on the phone, then scan qr code at the register. Now they added feature to pre-pay. Their users start to transition to that experience. That process is gradual for a few reasons: 1) old habit of scanning QR code 2) getting more used to pay on mobile phone ( the concern of security) 3) worried coffee gets cold when they get there. But the ones who transition over to pre-pay seem to love it since they don’t have to wait in the line to scan code anymore, and I think that feature will be more appealing for the group of users such as living in the urban area and millennials. I think that fragmentation of how users want to pay will last for a while for sure.

For the web payment you mentioned, not sure what sort of hook to the existing payment solutions such as apple pay, android pay. I would assume Chrome on Android could potentially make this possible.

hope this helps!

  • Vivian
#4

I remember stumbling upon your and Ray’s ideas a few years ago. I see even Pelle was involved in the mailing list.

It’s a pity you didn’t get involved in the W3C Web Payments Community Group back then and share your proposal there. You should consider doing so now on behalf of POYNT as a way to get these use cases on the table.

To provide some more context, I expect that when the WG finishes it’s work, browsers will implement an API that allows websites to request the initiation of a payment by providing a list of ways that they can accept payment (avoiding the horrible payment pages loaded with logos).

Something like: navigator.payments.requestPayment(...);

How the browser’s bridge this request to payment apps (digital wallets) capable of processing the payment will be implementation specific. The browser running on a physical payment device is quite a unique use case but it should be possible for the merchant to explicitly say they support payment via the POYNT device and for the browser to hand off to the POYNT payment flow.

What browser will run on the POYTNT terminals?
And, will apps be capable of running embedded Web views that might also do the same thing?

#5

We do not bundle a standalone browser on Poynt Terminals but we do allow Web views, which are powered by the same WebKit engine that Chrome browser uses. Webviews do provide several hooks to customize the behavior when loading web pages. We could provide some extensions in our Poynt OS to provide the bridging functionality that’s native to our terminal.

#6

That sounds like it will enable some interesting use cases, especially is you expose a way through the Web view API for the app to probe if it is running on a POYNT terminal.

You should have a look at the use cases that we’re currently looking at and consider submitting one or two that suit this scenario.

http://www.w3.org/TR/web-payments-use-cases/

1 Like