Having just completed a merchant survey, Retail CMOs were quite clear with their top 3 companies they would spend time with to improve eCommerce (payment focus):
- ShopPay (Shopify Merchants) – Best Conversion Rate
- ApplePay – #2 Conversions, #1 in Auth, Fraud and Transaction Value. No Incremental “wallet” costs, with well-established customer behavior and stored payment instruments.
- Google – #1 in: browser, guest checkout, data, analytics, conversion insight, targeted marketing (and other top of the funnel activities). No incremental costs, and well established consumer behavior, and stored payment instruments.
While we hear a lot about ShopPay, PayPal and ApplePay, we don’t hear much about Google payments. Google is a top 3 global payments team (product and engineering), now led by Ben Volk. They have local product leaders in over 30 countries, and have been a key part of global success stories like UPI and PIX.
Within eCommerce, CMOs specifically called out Google as a top 3 partner they would work with in Payments. One CMO said “Tom, I’m not looking to add any new payment buttons to checkout, further optionality does not increase conversion rate. My problem is data and using it to create a better CX. The death of third party cookies has been tough for all of our top of the funnel activities. I need partners that understand the entire funnel, payment is the easiest part. When I want to see the performance of my campaign Google holds all of the data in eCom. “
From an eCommerce perspective, CMOs also extolled the virtues of Chome AutoFill, with the only negative being the inability to “mark” CAF transactions in analytics. Think about the assets Google has to bring in eCom
- Strong merchant relationships with Global Sales Team
- Data across the funnel, all brought together in Google Analytics dashboard
- Chrome Browser
- Consumer Payment Methods in Chrome Browser
- Browser Authentication
- Google Account Authentication
- Merchant website passkey management
- DPANs in Handsets
- Consumer Biometric Authentication in Handsets
- Consumer Behavior
- AI in Gemini
- Google Cloud for collaborative modeling
- Campaign Management and Targeted Advertising
- Google Wallet for credentials
- Google India Pay Anyone Platform
- Google Wallet APIs
- Tokenization and VIrtual cards
- Google Pay API (ie Payment Button)
- Central bank relationships across the globe
- Preferred bank partner (Banks have labeled Apple Enemy #1)
- Product and Engineering teams to bring this all together
I would not bet against Google in payments, nor would I bet that Google will let another player take over their leadership in Guest Checkout (over 50% in some retailers).
Their challenge? Historically, it has been leadership flux with 8 different payment heads in 10 yrs. Payments require patience and focus. Apple’s team under Jennifer Bailey wins hands down here. She has had the same world class team since the 2014 launch of ApplePay. Her team sometimes has to educate their Issuer/network counterparts on prior agreements and why things are done the way they are. Apple plays the long game. Ben can play this role at Google.
I’m not going into more detail here for several reasons, but most of you can imagine what a better Google services will look like, combining customer-permissioned data and authentication from campaign to landing page to checkout. Just as Shopify has used its data to lead in tuning conversions (end of Funnel). Google is the ONLY merchant partner that can assist with tuning the entire funnel. Google’s advancement in Authentication and Passkeys, combined with their analytics, cloud and AI are set to enable an eCom transformation.
In a merchant discussion this week, we were talking about agentic commerce. A CMO said “why on earth would I ever collaborate with OpenAI or Perplexity, there is no way I’m letting my data play there. I’m not going to enable a new intermediary to front my consumer relationships. My first focus is to create a better CX; for example, I understand 12 yrs of apparel preferences from color to style. When someone wants a new outfit for a specific type of event, at a specific time of year, I’m best placed to make that recommendation. While I don’t have the AI expertise to pull this off yet, Google will help me”.
I can’t help but laugh at Issuer concerns over data, with respect to Google. They have it and use it to help consumers and merchants every day. If you were a merchant CMO, who would you partner with in Payments and eCommerce? This battle is Google’s to lose (and they won’t).