Google Pay integration patterns that drive conversions on Android

Posted by Jose Ugia, Developer Relations Engineer, Google Pay & Anthony Panissidi, Technical Writer, Google Developer Studio

What do Gilt, MTS, Panera Bread, and SpotHero have in common?

At first glance, you probably only see four totally different businesses:

• Gilt is an online shopping and lifestyle website.
• MTS is a mobile network operator with 80 million users in Armenia, Belarus, and Russia.
• Panera Bread is a chain of more than 2,000 fast-casual bakery-cafe restaurants in the US and Canada.
• SpotHero is a digital parking marketplace that lets drivers reserve and pay for parking spots in more than 300 cities in the US and Canada.

However, all four businesses partnered with us to identify and adopt integration patterns that drive the most conversions on Google Pay for Android. In this blog post, we share these proven integration practices so that you can get the most out of Google Pay in your Android apps, as well as additional security tips that you can use to further secure your payment flows.

UI and UX patterns

Take a look at the following strategies to improve user experience in your app:

• Payment-method selection
• Express checkout
• Guest checkout
• Payment notifications

Payment-method selection

If you set Google Pay as a default payment option for ready-to-pay users, your users only need to click or tap twice to complete their transactions, so they enjoy a more-seamless payment experience and they're less likely to abandon their carts.

Our partners who implemented this pattern reported a significant increase in their success metrics. For example, at Gilt, 34% of total Google Pay checkouts were net-new Gilt member conversions and 57% of total Google Pay checkouts were reactivations of lapsed Gilt members.

Express checkout

This feature lets your users purchase an item directly from the item's detail page without adding it to a cart, which shortens their path to purchase completion.

For example, Gilt integrated this feature into their checkout process so its users can complete the checkout process with only a few clicks or taps. The Google Pay button on their product page lets users move directly to checkout with Google Pay set as a default payment option.

Guest checkout

This feature makes it easier for your users to complete purchases and convert, and more likely to create an account and engage again later.

To enable guest checkout, add Google Pay as an option to continue with the payment process alongside your account-creation elements.

For example, Panera Bread enabled guest checkout, and found a 7% increase in order value and 30% increase in wallet share.

As another example, SpotHero enabled guest checkout, and found that its sales funnel increased by 20 times while 87% of total checkouts were completed with Google Pay.

Payment notifications

This feature lets your users pay directly from notifications, which reduces friction in the payment process and further increases conversions.

Users sometimes receive payment notifications that they expect, such as after they abandon carts, make donations, or need to add credit to a prepaid card. They typically find these transactions simple and familiar, so they're ready to pay quickly with a little nudge.

MTS adopted this pattern to let their customers add credit to their accounts directly from notifications and experienced a 80% increase in conversions.

Learn more

For more information about how to implement these UI and UX patterns, see our sample open source app and developer documentation.

Security tips

Before we go, we also want to share these security tips to further secure your payment flows:

• Use SSL for all connections between your apps and backend services over the public internet.
• Do not collect or store payment data, or any other sensitive information in the clear within your app.
• Order price can be calculated on the client side to show it in your UI and keep the user informed, but only allow for payments with calculations applied in your backend services.

Learn more

Want to learn more about Google Pay? Here's what you can do:

• To get started with Google Pay, see our developer documentation.
• To integrate with Google Pay, visit Google Pay's Business Console.
• Follow @GooglePayDevs on Twitter for future updates. If you have questions, tag @GooglePayDevs and include #AskGooglePayDevs in your tweets.