Tag Archives: Android Pay API

What’s next for Google payment and loyalty experiences

Posted by Pali Bhat, VP of Payment Products

Thousands of apps and millions of stores accept Android Pay, a simpler and more secure mobile payment experience. Android Pay is now available in 10 markets, with more coming soon, including Brazil, Canada, Russia, Spain and Taiwan. And in addition to our already announced Visa and Mastercard partnerships, we'll soon enable a streamlined mobile checkout experience for PayPal users.

The newest ways to pay with Google

Yesterday, we announced the Google Payment API, which lets people pay in app or online with any verified credit or debit card saved to their Google Account, via products like Google Play, Chrome and YouTube.

Paying with Google in the Wish app

For users, the option to pay with Google means breezing through checkout without needing to remember and type multiple lines of payment details. You simply choose your preferred card, enter a security code or authenticate with your Android device, and check out.

Developers who adopt this API can enable an easy-to-use checkout experience for their customers. Sign up for early access to the new Google Payment API.

In the upcoming months, we'll also enable people in the U.S. to send or receive payments via the Google Assistant. On your Google Home or Android device, it's as simple as saying "Ok Google, send $10 to Jane for pizza." All you need is a debit card linked to your Google account.

Pay friends on Google Assistant

Connect with customers before, during and after purchase

We're also announcing new ways for merchants to engage and reward customers before they walk into the store and after they've left.

The Card Linked Offers API drives customer loyalty by providing a new channel to deliver targeted offers, and Panera Bread is one of the first merchants who will roll out this new capability nationally. MyPanera members who save their loyalty card to Android Pay can discover offers and learn about new menu items, surfaced by Android Pay when they are at the store. The offer is redeemed when you use your MyPanera account at checkout.

Card Linked Offers for Panera Bread in the Android Pay app

We're also making it easier for Android Pay users to add loyalty programs. For example, Walgreens Balance Rewards® members who manually apply their loyalty account with a phone number and use Android Pay will receive a notification on their phone that easily enables them to link that loyalty card to Android Pay for future visits. This experience is powered by our smart tap technology, which Walgreens has fully deployed across their 8,000+ U.S. stores.

There's more—we're collaborating with Clover, a First Data company, to expand our smart tap technology beyond national retailers to businesses of all sizes. With the upcoming integration of smart tap in Clover's developer APIs, you'll be able to build Android apps for loyalty, coupon and gift card redemption and new features, such as order ahead and tap for pick up.

Visit developers.google.com/payments for the latest on all of our Google Payment, Loyalty and Offers APIs.

Enhancing Android Pay APIs

Posted by Pali Bhat, Senior Director, Product Management

Today, we’re enhancing our APIs, making it easier than ever for the developer community to integrate with Android Pay. With just a few lines of code, you can enable quick and seamless checkout to help increase purchase conversions and ongoing engagement.

Improve conversions within apps

We’ve been working with popular apps such as Airbnb, Yelp Eat24, Kickstarter, TicketMaster, Uber and many others to bring the ease of speedy checkouts to apps. We also want to make the same great in-app experience available to all developers, big or small. So we’re taking a few steps:

  • Earlier today, we announced Android Instant Apps, which gives users the ability to pay using Android Pay with a single tap, without the friction of getting a user to install the app to complete their transaction. 

Example of Android Pay in Android Instant Apps

  • We’re opening the Android Pay API to all developers selling physical goods and services in markets where Android Pay is available—just sign up at developers.google.com/android-pay/
  • We’ve teamed up with payment processors globally so developers can integrate Android Pay with their Android apps in just a few hours.

Enhance mobile web payments

Many users continue to make purchases on mobile sites. But buying something from a website on your phone can be clumsy and cumbersome, which results in much lower conversion rates on mobile sites than on desktop sites.

To make painful web checkout forms a thing of the past, we will be launching PaymentRequest, a brand new web API that we are developing together with Chrome and standardizing across browsers through W3C. Android Pay will be part of this API to allow users to pay on mobile websites as they do in-store and in-app.

Example of Android Pay in PaymentRequest
Drive deeper engagement

Thanks for all the great feedback on our Save to Android Pay API since launch. You spoke and we’ve listened: We think you’ll be thrilled with the latest improvements to the Save to Android Pay API. The following enhancements help developers build stronger loyalty and engagement with new and existing customers:

  • Enable users to add offers, loyalty cards and gift cards in the Android Pay app with the tap of a button. Simply add a deep link to an email, SMS message, push notification or within an app and you’re all set.
  • Enroll new customers into a loyalty program in a variety of ways with the new simplified sign-up feature. Customers can sign-up either in store via a NFC tap or through a sign-up page linked from an Android Pay transaction notification.

Example sign-up feature for Walgreens Balance Reward®  
via Save to Android Pay from transaction notification
We believe that mobile payments can make for a better, more secure shopping experience - so we're in this together for the long haul. We’re building a robust Android Pay ecosystem, one that’s open and scalable, to enable developers to drive mobile payments - and their businesses - forward. We're very excited for the road ahead and we hope you are too.

To learn more about Android Pay and share your feedback, visit our developer pages.