Visa Checkout Shows Its Colors as a Force in E-Commerce

Visa Checkout hasn’t been in the market long—just a couple months longer than Apple Pay has been around—but it’s made quite an impact.

A recent report emerged to detail just what kind of headway Visa Checkout has made lately, and it’s already proving itself a potent new addition to the marketplace.

Recently, Visa Checkout added several new partners to the field, including Dunkin’ Donuts, movie ticket outpost Fandango, the Sundance Catalog, and United States locations of Williams-Sonoma.

Those outside the United States, meanwhile, aren’t going wanting; Australia has added several locations including Pizza Hut, BONDS, and Ticketek locations, and Canada has brought in locations of Indigo, Roots, Running Room, and Simons to the fold.

The added locations have likely helped Visa Checkout reach an ever-widening scope of users, with current figures noting around four million customer accounts, over 125,000 total merchants of all sizes putting the system to use and 260 different financial institutions working with Visa Checkout.

Word from comScore augments the reports, saying that there’s a 69 percent conversion rate for users making purchases. What’s more, users tend to spend more putting Visa Checkout to use, about seven percent more than other payment options.

Millward Brown, meanwhile, found 95 percent of users find signing up to be “easy,” and 96 percent believed that the product was safe to use, providing plenty of reason to not only sign up with Visa Checkout but also put it to work at the retailer level.

Just to top the whole thing off, Visa also reportedly has some plans in the works for a major new marketing initiative, complete with fresh advertising, to start off summer. Given that the summer travel season will likely begin in earnest with the arrival of Memorial Day, this may well be the best time to start such a thing and get users interested in using Visa Checkout while on the road.

All of this adds up to one key point: Visa Checkout is rapidly making inroads with businesses and consumers alike, and as the summer travel season fires up and too soon after gives way to the Christmas shopping season, Visa Checkout might be putting itself in a good place to be useful alongside its various competitors.

While it will indeed have plenty of competition—Apple Pay and its core user base, the surprising versatility of the upcoming Samsung Pay, and a host of others—it’s also going to have a lot going for it.

The wide user base of Visa cardholders, the array of partners worldwide, and of course the added value of users who are willing to spend more and feel safe doing so will all be draws.

Those numbers on spending are pretty impressive, and those numbers on security more so. A lot of studies have been made so far about mobile payment security, and that Visa can put up a 96 percent rate of people feeling safe is no mean feat. That’s likely to give the company a lot of extra credibility in the market, and that’s not something to easily turn down.