PayPal Rolls Out Checkout With Smart Payment Buttons

Today PayPal is launching Checkout with Smart Payment Buttons, the latest salvo in the firm’s ongoing war against checkout friction.

Source: PYMNTS Checkout Conversion

Friction during the online checkout process is a sales killer. A quick glance at the PYMNTS Checkout Conversion Index bears this out: $236 billion a year in potential sales is shifted away from merchants who introduce too much friction at checkout to those who don’t.

It’s a problem the team at PayPal has helped merchants overcome since day one on eBay, and since PayPal introduced One Touch for mobile in 2014 and web in 2015, an offering that COO Bill Ready noted in a blog post has already had a notable effect for businesses and customers all over the world.

“One Touch is the most rapidly adopted product in PayPal’s history, and today, more than 96 million consumers have opted in to One Touch, and more than 9 million businesses (and 79 percent of the Internet Retailer 100) have enabled One Touch — without having to do any additional integration work. According to a recent comScore survey, 55 percent of customers said they made more online purchases because of One Touch.”

With the introduction today of PayPal Checkout with Smart Payment Buttons, Ready said that PayPal has taken another big step in eliminating friction from online checkout.

According to the COO, Smart Payment Buttons dynamically presents consumers with the most relevant payment method at checkout. For consumers, he noted, it makes it easy to pay the way they want to. For merchants, it makes those choices possible without Nascar-izing the checkout page with payment options that might not otherwise be relevant.

“Over the next few weeks, we will enable iDEAL for customers in the Netherlands, Bancontact for customers in Belgium, MyBank for customers in Italy, Giropay for customers in Germany and EPS for customers in Austria,” Ready explained. This comes in addition to SEPA Direct Debit for customers in Germany and, he said, is the start of an ongoing rollout of more local payments methods.

Smart Payment Buttons work like One Touch, which means users can skip over the friction of entering usernames, passwords, payment and shipping information once they’ve opted in. Checkout with Smart Payment Buttons also allows U.S. businesses to easily offer Venmo as a payment method at checkout, as well as PayPal Credit and specific local alternative payment methods that best meet the needs of a business’ user base, including local digital wallets and funding sources.

Getting merchants up and running comes via one “simple integration” that also includes access to PayPal’s new Shopper Insights tool, which gives PayPal’s merchant customers aggregated and anonymous views into PayPal shoppers visiting their site. The data they will have access to includes how many PayPal shoppers convert to buyers, what devices they’re shopping with as well as a host of recommendations on how to turn shoppers into buyers and customers into loyal patrons based on the shopping patterns already visible.

The new PayPal Checkout with Smart Buttons is getting its official public rollout today, although there are merchants already using it out there. ALDO, Barnes & Noble and Soft Surroundings have already incorporated the new PayPal Checkout, and eCommerce platforms from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Salucro have already enabled Smart Payment Buttons for their customers.

Tune back in tomorrow for more on this story. Karen Webster spoke with PayPal’s Bill Ready about the new checkout expansion and delved into what it will mean for customers and merchants around the web and around the world.