Accepting Google Pay for Merchants: What You Need to Know

According to Statista, a retail business can lose up to 70% of all potential customers at the checkout due to an inconvenient payment procedure. One of the reasons for an incomplete purchase is that customers don’t trust your payment system and are afraid to disclose their personal data and private information.

So before you integrate any payment system to your ecommerce website, you should ensure that the solution is convenient, used by your target market, and secure. Google Pay, formerly known as Google Wallet, is one of the best ways to make payments directly from your smartphone; it’s a quick, highly secure, and easy way to pay online. So what is Google Wallet and how does it work? Let’s dive in and find out!

Google Pay: a must-have payment system for ecommerce stores

In 2018, the old Android Pay and Google Wallet merged into the unified pay system called Google Pay—a digital wallet and mobile payment system that enables merchants to accept fast and easy payments for physical goods and services everywhere they do business, including in stores and online (both in-app and on the web).

With Google Pay, customers can use their smartphones or wear OS watches to make payments quickly with a simple tap of a button in the mobile app or on the ecommerce website. Google Pay stores a customer’s credit, debit, gift card, and loyalty information in their Google Account, allowing them to handle fast payments online. It’s noteworthy that Google Pay is free of charge for both merchants and customers.

Google Pay is compatible with Android-based mobile devices (KitKat 4.4+) and smartwatches and is available in 28 countries. New countries are added all the time, so check the latest list of supported banks for each region here.

Last year, Google Pay collectively carried out about 860 million transactions for business, so it’s not surprising that it is becoming more and more popular.

How does Google Pay work on the web? 

Google Pay is a server-side wallet, which means that all of a customer’s data is stored on Google’s system rather than on the customer’s device. Financial operations are carried out between Google’s servers and the merchant’s existing payment gateway, offering a one-touch checkout experience for millions of Google users.

Furthermore, Google Pay does not submit to merchants the customer’s real card numbers when they pay online; instead, Google Pay simplifies a payment process for ecommerce businesses using tokenization in which a token stands for a customer’s real credit and debit card numbers.

Here are the basic stages of how payments work online:

1. A customer adds a credit or debit card to their Google Pay app. Google Pay requests a token to represent the customer’s real credit from the bank that issued that card.
2. As soon as the token is issued, this card is now ‘tokenized’, meaning that it has a unique identification number associated with it. Google Pay encodes the recently tokenized card and it is ready to be used for financial transactions.
3. The card network verifies the encryption and correlates the token with the customer’s real card number.
4. Your acquiring bank and your customer’s issuing bank use existing customer data and decoded customer-billing information to finalize the financial operation.

The benefits of Google Pay for ecommerce business

Implementing Google Pay for ecommerce websites isn’t just about keeping up with the latest payment solutions. There are a number of solid reasons to add Google Pay as a payment system for both you and your customers: