Google Pay is designed to make transactions simple from contactless payments to online purchases and even peer-to-peer payments. It also allows users to store tickets and passes, manage loyalty cards and keep track of transactions. With Google Pay, users can pay with all credit and debit cards saved to their Google Account, making hundreds of millions of cards enabled for faster checkout in your apps or websites. This includes payments for goods and services on e-commerce merchants, online marketplaces and Android apps.
When you integrate the Google Pay API into your app or site, your customers can then transact using any of those cards in as few as two clicks.
Ways to pay with Google Pay
When users use their NFC-enabled mobile device or smart watch to pay in places such as supermarkets, restaurants or shops, the card selected is emulated from the device using a secure number that changes on every transaction. Only the bank or card issuer can decrypt this number to process the transaction. The process of securing your card details is called tokenization. Only cards from supported banks can be tokenized, and this is a necessary step to pay contactless using Google Pay.
Users can pay in-stores using NFC-enabled devices with forms of payment that support tokenization.
In contrast, when users pay in your app or on your site through Google Pay, they can select any card saved to their Google Account, including tokenized cards. This enables users to pay on any device in your sites and apps globally.
Users paying online can use any card saved under their Google account(s).
All forms of payments are stored in the user's Google account and protected by multiple layers of security. This includes payment methods that users have already saved to pay for services like YouTube, Google Play or to speed up checkout forms using Chrome Autofill.
Why add Google Pay to your app or site?
You can integrate Google Pay's online APIs to increase conversions by providing a more convenient, more secure and faster way to pay to your users. Some of the benefits include:
- Simplify the checkout experience so users don’t have to remember their payment details, making the checkout process faster and reducing the percentage of abandonments.
- Increase security by encrypting users’ choice of payment before it is sent back to your app. You can also use it to charge orders directly from your servers or payment processor.
- Enable payments on multiple surfaces to provide more flexibility to your users. This also allows you to easily enable payments on other Google surfaces like the Google Assistant.
- Increase conversions for new users by reducing friction for those who do not have an account on your app or site. The APIs support returning information like billing and shipping addresses in addition to forms of payment if needed to process an order.
Integrating Google Pay
Adding Google Pay to your site or application is just a few lines of code away. There are tutorials on how to integrate Google Pay in your website or Android app and step-by-step guided codelabs for Web and Android. Here is a more visual tutorial:
To get started, use this integration checklist (Android | Web) to make sure you have everything you need to complete the integration. When you’re ready to go live with your integration, request production access and follow the final steps to deploy your app (Android | Web) in a production environment.
Google Pay and the Payment Request API
The Payment Request API is a Web Payments W3C standard that provides a native browser experience for collecting payment information from the user. You can accept Google Pay via PaymentRequest directly, however this may not be available across browsers.
To enable Google Pay for your users across all major browsers with a single implementation, we recommend using the Google Pay JavaScript library as described above. This enables a native Payment Request experience on Chrome, while giving you the flexibility of supporting Google users on other browsers.
The payments sheet is presented natively when triggered from a browser with support for Payment Handler API (on the right), while it falls back to showing a pop-up on browsers that don’t.
As users’ needs evolve, we continue to add features and forms of payment to the Google Pay API –like the recent addition of PayPal– so you can get access to these new payment methods in your app or site without any additional development work.
Tune in to Google Pay at Google I/O 2019
Don’t miss Google Pay sessions at Google I/O this year to learn about the latest features we are bringing to Google Pay. Bookmark our sessions and check back for livestream details–we look forward to seeing you this week.
- Building Powerful Checkout Experiences with Google Pay
- Tue, May 7 from 3:00-4:00pm PDT
- Engaging Customers Beyond Payments: Tickets, Transit and Boarding Passes
- Thu, May 9 from 2.30-3.30pm PDT