Using multiple payment providers

[msporny]

It isn't clear how a customer would be able to pick among multiple payment providers to perform the payment for the digital good. For example, how would one choose to pay via PayPal or their Google Wallet account?

[kumar303]

This is a UI feature we punted on because we knew v1 was shipping with single payment providers (that is, a developer can only specify one of multiple whitelisted providers). The solution is to build some UI into the device API to allow the user to select a provider. This also adds some complications though because any extra clicks we add to the buyflow increases the potential drop-off rate for new customers.

[msporny]

Yes, agreed. There are ways to mitigate some of the buyflow drop-off rate issues. For example, you could specify a default payment provider. The "Buy" button could have a drop-down associated with it so that if you just click "Buy" it uses your default payment provider, but if you click "Buy->dropdown->Buy with XYZ", it would initiate the payment with that payment provider.

The question is, do we want the buy button and drop-down to be a part of the browser chrome, or do we want to give the developer the ability to generate the button and dropdown. I'm leaning toward the latter, which means that the meta information would be available through something like navigator.payment.getProviders().