Published on the 17/07/2014 | Written by Beverley Head
A battle royale is shaping up between leading payments specialists each wanting to “own” the Australian online payments market…
More than nine out of ten adult Australians has shopped online – representing a $A14.7 billion market in 2013 according to a new survey commissioned by Visa. Not surprisingly it’s a hotly contested payments market – which is currently dominated by PayPal.
According to the most recent HP-RFI Australian Payments Research Report, PayPal remains the preferred online payment mechanism for 53 percent of Australians (up from 51 percent six months earlier).
Just 19 percent prefer to pay online using Visa or MasterCard credit cards, and 15 percent prefer scheme debit cards for online purchases – even though 89 percent of the population has at least one of the two vendors’ cards.
While it’s worth remembering that consumers can use credit and debit cards to make payments via PayPal, both MasterCard and Visa are looking to grow market share in their own right.
Visa this week announced at an event in San Francisco that it had reworked and rebranded its V.me digital wallet, turning it into a “payments experience” called Visa Checkout. Australia will be one of the first markets to have access to the system along with Canada and the US.
Visa Checkout allows people, once registered, to use any internet connected device to complete an online payment by pressing the Visa Checkout button on a merchant’s website and inputting their logon and password.
Meanwhile MasterCard has announced plans to update its MasterPass digital wallet and from next month will allow merchants to launch in-app payment buttons that can complete a payment with a single click.
While PayPal currently dominates online purchasing, Greg Storey, Visa Checkout head in Asia Pacific said that the research which Visa had commissioned showed that there was still a high rate of online shopping abandonment when consumers became frustrated at the hoops they had to climb through when looking to complete an online purchase.
The survey, of 1000 Australian adults, found that 44 percent were frustrated at the amount of detail they were expected to provide when shopping online, 37 percent had walked away from an online purchase because it was too hard, and 30 percent abandoned their online shopping when they could not recall their password.
Storey said that suggested there was still plenty of opportunity for innovation in online payments.
The author, Beverley Head attended the launch of Visa Checkout as a guest of Visa.
