Ο οργανισμός World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) που ορίζει τα παγκόσμια πρότυπα του διαδικτύου και που ιδρύθηκε από τους πρωτοπόρους του internet Tim Berners-Lee και Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe δημιούργησε έναν νέο οργανισμό το Web Payments Working Group (WPWG) με σκοπό την δημιουργία πρότυπων για τις διαδικτυακές πληρωμές καθώς και των διαδικτυακών εφαρμογών που θα τις χρησιμοποιούν.

Στους τρόπους πληρωμών φυσικά δεν θα μπορούσε να λείπει το κατεξοχήν διαδικτυακό ψηφιακό νόμισμα το Bitcoin.

We invite you to join the new Web Payments Working Group, launched 21 October 2015. From the press release:

“The industry has looked to digital wallets as a way to improve security and usability, as well as to support marketing initiatives. And yet, users have not yet wholeheartedly embraced them,” said W3C CEO Dr. Jeff Jaffe. “We believe that one reason for this is that the digital wallet market is fragmented and providers use incompatible programming interfaces. The proposed standards from W3C will help ensure interoperability of different solutions by standardizing the programming interfaces. So when you buy something, you should have a standard way to match the payment instruments you have with the ones accepted by the merchant, in a way that integrates smoothly with the merchant’s checkout flow.”

Research from companies such as Business Insider confirms the diverse reasons why, on average, people do not complete online purchases 68% of the time. W3C Web Payments standards can help some of the issues related to shopping cart abandonment regarding usability and security, through standard messages and message flow for the initiation, confirmation, and completion of payments. With support from these APIs, users will choose a preferred payment instrument for a particular transaction, and the messages between Web application and payment service providers will be mediated by the browser on the user’s behalf.

“It is challenging today for merchants to offer new payment options to consumers because of the many proprietary solutions and number of different APIs that they have to deal with,” commented Mark Horwedel, CEO, Merchant Advisory Group (MAG). “Open standards from W3C will help payment providers and merchants lower costs of payment management, improve consumer choice and transparency, and create new opportunities to introduce value-added services. These standard APIs will also give us a foundation for future Web payments capabilities.”