Click to Pay: card payment made easy

Introduction

Who has never found themselves in the following situation...?

I am on an e-commerce site
I am moving on to payment
I select card payment
- The site does not inspire me enough confidence to enter my bank card information
- I realize that I do not have my card with me and that no other payment method is suitable for me

The challenge of cart abandonment in e-commerce

According to a study Baymard by 2023, out of all users of e-commerce sites, 21.8% of buyers who added items to their basket left the site without having bought anything for one of the following 3 reasons:

Lack of trust in the site to secure banking information (9.1%)
Payment flow that is too long/complex (8%)
The site does not offer enough payment methods (4.7%)

Whether in the US or Europe, the share of bank card payments on e-commerce sites remains dominant, exceeding 50%.

This preference for bank cards, combined with shopping cart abandonments, represents a colossal loss of profit: more than 80 billion euros for e-commerce platforms, including several hundred million euros for Visa and MasterCard, the giants of bank card networks.

Younger people might think that using Apple Pay or PayPal is all they need to do to solve these problems. However, compared to payment by bank card, few sites integrate them and even fewer users adopt them. These electronic payment solutions, although practical, are struggling to impose themselves. Not to mention the additional fees collected by Apple, PayPal, and acquirers (merchant banks).

Faced with this observation, Visa and MasterCard decided to act by launching an innovative solution: Click to Pay.

Click to Pay: A simplified payment solution

Imagine being able to pay with your bank card but without having to enter your card numbers manually. That's exactly what Click to Pay offers.

The principle is simple: you link your email or telephone number to your payment cards once and for all, and all you have to do is use this information for your future e-commerce purchases.

How it works

Make the link between your email/phone and your payment cards
- If you have a Visa card, create an account hither‍
- If you have a MasterCard card, create an account hither‍
- Click to Pay also exists for other bank card networks and the “Cartes Bancaires” (CB) group has announced it for 2026.

You will easily find the sites offering Click to Pay thanks to this icon:

Enter your email/phone on the e-commerce site in order to receive an OTP (One Time Password) that you enter later
- Most often, the email will be pre-filled if you are connected to the site.
That's it, the site will connect via intermediaries to your bank and allow you to pay with your bank card without having to enter your bank card information.

Demo

Sequence diagram

Expected benefits for users and retailers

Benefits for users

No need to enter your bank card information manually
Only one field to fill in instead of 4 (holder, card number, expiration date, CVC)
Bank information is never entered/stored on the website

Benefits for merchants (e-commerce sites)

Increased customer conversion rate
No need to manipulate bank data anymore
Works with the largest card networks (Visa, MasterCard,...)
Increased customer trust
Reducing fraud and litigation

Is this payment method really secure?

Regarding the payment flow between the merchant and the issuing bank, Click to Pay is absolutely secure. It is even more secure than paying by bank card thanks to the tokenization of the card, which avoids entering bank card information on the site.

On the other hand, on the user side, the situation is complicated. Click to Pay is satisfied with the simple entry of an OTP that the user will have received by email or SMS, so if an attacker accesses the user's email box or phone, then he can make fraudulent payments.

To overcome this problem on the user side, we can imagine that instead of entering a simple OTP, the user could do “app-based authentication”, i.e. open a banking application and validate the transaction with biometrics (facial or fingerprint recognition).

A deployment still limited despite the potential

On paper this payment method seems ideal, on the other hand, even if PSPs (Payment Service Providers) promise simple and fast integration, we are forced to note that few sites have integrated Click to Pay.

The major e-commerce platforms in France do not yet use it (Amazon, Cdiscount, Fnac, LeBonCoin, Decathlon,...).

Here are some hypotheses to explain the lack of Click to Pay integrations in France and around the world:

The number of people who have created a Click to Pay account is not public, but we can imagine that it is quite low at the moment.

Click to Pay was announced by Visa in March 2024 for a gradual deployment in France. But it takes time for e-commerce sites to prioritize the integration of this new payment method. The banks of the NatWest Group in Great Britain have automatically registered their customers for the Click to Pay service. If French banks do the same, it could encourage e-commerce sites to accelerate the integration of Click to Pay.

In France, the use of electronic payment solutions such as Apple, Google, Google, Samsung Pay or PayPal is not yet very widespread. However, this is not the case everywhere, in Asia it is the main payment method with more than 70% of the market shares, mainly via Alipay and WeChat.

It can be assumed that giants like Amazon are waiting to see the evolution of the market shares of electronic payment solutions before investing in the integration of Click to Pay.

Another hypothesis, availability, because the Visa account creation platform is sometimes not accessible and at MasterCard, the account creation platform indicates that it is not available in France.

On the other hand, the security issues mentioned in the article could also hinder the adoption of Click to Pay by e-commerce sites.

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At the last Paris Retail Week, Click to Pay was on everyone's lips, I wanted to share my learnings with you. At Theodo FinTech, we will soon have completed a Click to Pay integration PoC with Adyen and will share our feedback with you.

I am a Tech Lead at Theodo Fintech and am particularly interested in technological developments in payments: concrete problems that millions of users encounter.

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