Leveraging Pay with Google

Maksim Golivkin
tech-at-instacart
Published in
3 min readNov 13, 2017

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Pay with Google in Instacart checkout flow.

Selecting a good default saves user time and mental effort. In e-commerce, payment information, billing and shipping address are mandatory and filling them up during checkout or sign-up is annoying for the consumer and results in conversion drop-offs. Naturally, whenever there is an opportunity to improve this experience, Instacart is the first to take advantage of it.

In 2015, Instacart was a launch partner for Android Pay. It was a better user experience and a bet to increase checkout conversion. Android Pay was definitely a step in the right direction but it didn’t result in a huge win. The API had two problems: it was slow (to a point being mentally taxing for users) and not many customers were using it.

When Google presented Pay with Google, it struck a chord with us immediately, because

  • it leverages credit cards stored in Chrome, Play Store, Youtube and other Google e-properties
  • API feels faster as Google reduced the number of API calls (2 to 1), as well as made other latency optimizations
  • new API is so simple that our developer became one of the champions of the project

Pay with Google doesn’t fully replace Android Pay. The new API and brand are used in merchant apps, such as Instacart, while Android Pay remains a separate app on the user phone, acting like a wallet with credit cards. Android Pay is used to pay for physical goods in brick & mortar stores. There are minor differences in user experience on the phone, too. For instance, when using a card saved outside of Android Pay, Pay with Google will prompt the user to enter the card’s security code. Additionally, once a transaction with Pay with Google is made, the user receives a notification suggesting to save her credit card in Android Pay (so she could use it in the physical store) if she has the app. The interplay between the two is somewhat confusing, however, introduction of Pay with Google is still exciting, since it comes with a prospect of many more users having their billing and shipping information available for merchant apps.

To provide a better experience, we are using Pay with Google as a default for new users. Unfortunately, the new API will only disclose if the user has a credit card saved in Android Pay, but not if she has any cards in other Google properties (Chrome, Youtube, etc). We decided to skip billing information step completely if the user has a card in Android Pay (which is compatible with our former Android Pay flow), but also to provide Pay with Google as a payment option if the API is available for the customer.

To summarize, at Instacart, we will use every opportunity to save user’s time and effort. Transition to Pay with Google API only took our developer a few days of work. Right now we are keeping a close eye on metrics and plan to report the improvements as we see them. Pay with Google already feels like a great step forward to simplify and improve user shopping experience on Android and we are excited to take advantage of it.

P.S. Pay with Google also allows to obtain user shipping address and phone number. For v1, we didn’t leverage this information, but we are looking forward to try out such an experiment soon and would love to learn from other industry participants about their experience.

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Engineering Manager on sabbatical. ex-Instacart, ex- Uber, ex- Kiva Systems