231 - One-click checkout in WooCommerce with PeachPay

Interview with Nathan Wrigley and David Mainayar

So if you’ve bought anything online recently, and you have bought something online recently haven’t you, you’ll have noticed that merchants are trying to make all-the-things as easy as possible so that you go from browse to buy as quickly as possible.

One of the things that us WordPressers love is a bit of WooCommerce and the way that it makes creating online stores fast and easy.

Let’s be honest though, there are aspects of WooCommerce that are better than others, and there’s a huge 3rd party ecosystem of plugins which aim to finesse aspects of a WooCommerce site, so that it’s optimised in the way that the merchant requires.

If you’re trying to figure out how to do eCommerce well, a good rule of thumb (not in every case) is to go to see what some of the larger players are doing. If they’ve invested in a particular piece of functionality, then it’s safe to assume that it’s been field tested, it works and it’s going to be iterated upon.

The leader in eCommerce is clearly Amazon. They’re #1 in just about every region and vertical.

One of their innovations early on was the 1-click-checkout. You’ve bought with them before, you’re already logged in, why make you go through the entire checkout process. Better to just give you a ‘buy now’ button and bypass multiple steps. You know it works because they carry in using it.

Turns out that they whole 1-click-checkout technology belonged to Amazon and Amazon was the sole trader allowed to use it. Now, I won’t claim to know what’s changed, but now other companies can use this style of checkout, without the fear of Amazon’s lawyers!

This is where PeachPay comes in. It’s a one click checkout solution for WooCommerce, enabling people to log into PeachPay and then browse the web, looking for things to buy. If they encounter a website with the PeachPay checkout enabled then they can use the 1-click-checkout option. So it’s a 3rd party solution enabling faster checkouts across the web.

The more companies that get on board, the more likely it is to be useful, after all if 1% of sites start to use it, then you’re never going to see their checkout button, but if 30% do, then you’ll see it everywhere and benefit from a faster checkout.

I spoke to David Mainayar today about PeachPay. I have to tell you that the audio on his end was a little intermittent, it’s totally listenable, but it’s good to be forewarned.

We talked about PeachPay how it differs from services like Amazon pay Apple, pay, Android, PayPal and others. We also talked about how the app actually works in terms of onboarding new users. What the experience is like in WooCommerce. How you install it.

We also talked about how it maintains state on a particular browser, and how this can be supplemented by using their Android or iOS app. The idea is that it keeps you logged in on one browser, and if you go to a different browser, you have to set up again with their simple onboarding procedure.

We also get into how they get paid and it turns out that they take a little bit of Stripe’s slice of the pie, which is an interesting idea, and the fact that there’s no data held anywhere else. It’s all done through tokenised Stripe payments.

Briefly, we discuss this:

• What is PeachPay?
• Why does anyone need this?
• How does this differ from something like Amazon pay? Apple Pay / Android Pay / PayPal / Lastpass. It feels like a long shot to take on the existing payment providers?
• How do you onboard new customers?
• How does it work with WooCommerce?
• Will Automattic do this down the line?
• How does it maintain state and know who is logged in?
• Where is the data held?
• What’s the cost / fee model that they have? If you’re using Stripe isn’t this more expensive that a regular checkout?
• Are there apps for phones?
• Did you know there’s another payment service with the same name?!

Since recording the podcast, they’ve received some investment from WooCommerce themselves and you can find out more about that in some of the links below.

Useful links:

PeachPay

https://bobwp.com/the-age-of-one-click-checkout/

https://upnrunn.com/blog/2021/02/how-peachpay-is-democratizing-one-click-checkout/

https://wplift.com/peachpay-review

https://myworks.software/how-peachpay-is-reinventing-the-concepts-of-checkout-and-post-checkout/

https://www.businessinsider.com/peachpay-one-click-checkout-woocommerce-fintech-payments-bolt-fast-2021-4

https://robertjacobi.com/woocommerce-invests-in-peachpay.html