BigCommerce Enables Apple Pay Integration, Bringing Market Share of $123B to Growing Retailers

Today, BigCommerce merchants will be able to seamlessly activate Apple Pay on their websites, allowing their iPhone, iPad and Mac customers to checkout with one touch payment using Apple’s TouchID fingerprint technology.

Apple Pay for Web is supported for businesses using PayPal powered by Braintree, Stripe and Authorize.net payment gateways –– with support for First Data, Clover Gateway and Cybersource coming soon.

BigCommerce customers can activate the integration now.

Mobile commerce sales are expected to reach more than $123 billion in 2016, a 39% increase over 2015 and more than double the growth from 2014. In total, mobile commerce will account for nearly one-third of all retail ecommerce sales and 2.6% of total retail sales for the year.

The vast majority of these sales are occurring on smartphones, on which mobile commerce revenue saw a 95% year-over-year increase in 2015. eMarketer predicts that the year-over-year growth of smartphone mobile commerce will slow to 50% in 2016, but absolute growth will be roughly the same: hitting $20 billion in additional sales.

Apple Pay plays a major role in this increase in mobile commerce conversion and revenue by removing barriers to checkout. According to a Q1 2016 Forrester report, mobile traffic accounts for 44% of retailer traffic, but only 33% of online sales. Apple Pay has great potential for helping solve cart abandonment.

Specifically, Apple Pay removes the need for consumers to manually enter or re-enter payment details on small screens. Instead, consumers can use the Apple Pay option and verify their identity using Apple’s TouchID fingerprint technology. When you make a purchase, Apple Pay uses a device-specific number and unique transaction code. So your card number is never stored on your device or our servers, and when you pay, your card numbers are never shared by Apple with merchants.

“The single biggest challenge in mobile conversion stems from the difficulty of entering name, address, and payment details on a mobile device. Apple Pay on the web solves this problem by removing these steps. This eliminates friction and streamlines checkout, thereby saving sales that would otherwise be postponed or lost,” said Jimmy Duvall, chief product officer for BigCommerce. “By utilizing Apple Pay on BigCommerce stores, thousands of retailers will benefit from higher conversion rates and provide their customers a best-in-class shopping experience.”

Larger companies like WayFair and RetailMeNot are already seeing the upward revenue trajectory of mobile-ready consumers, and are preparing for a smartphone future.

“Over the past year we’ve seen consumers’ willingness to purchase on mobile increase a lot, to the point where the share of transactions taking place on the smartphone has doubled since late 2014,” Bob Sherwin, senior director of acquisition at ecommerce furniture company Wayfair, told eMarketer.

Tablets currently make up little more than half of all mobile commerce sales, but that is expected to change by 2017, when smartphones capture the majority of the market.

“Tablets are still growing but at a lesser extent than we’ve seen in the past,” Marissa Tarleton, CMO of North America at digital coupon marketplace RetailMeNot, told eMarketer. “As we partner with our retailers, we’re optimizing for smartphones.”

By 2020, smartphones will capture $129.44 billion of all retail mobile commerce outlays in the U.S., a growth rate of 18.3%. And smaller and mid-size brands should not be excluded from that share of revenue.

As mid-market brands continue to build their businesses and market to their target audiences, world-class on-site checkout experiences are mere customer expectations. BigCommerce will enable all growing brands on its platform the ability to offer their customers new, trusted technology that solves for frictioned experiences.

Stay tuned for more product announcements similar to Apple Pay over the coming months as BigCommerce ramps up to provide a full omnichannel suite of tools to future-proof growing brands for the next wave of online business.