HACKER Q&A
📣 burtonator

Why don't browsers have billing+shipping APIs? This would kill Amazon


Every time you do a purchase online, you need to send the site two pieces of information

- billing information (credit card information)

- a shipping address.

You could go through the site like you normally do, create a shopping cart, then on checkout, the sites sends the user to an XML/JSON page saying basically:

"The user wants to buy this, can we have his billing information?"

At that point the user confirms the shopping cart locally, the the browser sends the billing information to the site.

This is done right now with credit cards but not with addresses.

If Mozilla or Chrome did this it would REALLY hurt Amazon but also really ENABLE smaller merchant sites.

IT would also make buying things from 3rd parties super easy.

One of the nice things of buying from Amazon is the one click shopping which doesn't exist anywhere else really.

  👤 stephenr Accepted Answer ✓
There literally is a web payments API, part of which is a PaymentAddress component.

It's supported by Safari, Chrome, Edge and Firefox, on desktop, Android and iOS, according to MDN.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Req...

👤 the_hoser
I doubt it would hurt Amazon at all. In fact, if you could propose a way to do it without any serious UX or security concerns, they'd probably sponsor the effort.

There's a whole lot more to e-commerce than accepting customer information.

👤 dredmorbius
This addresses one part of concerns with online commerce, and might well be relegated to a separate shopping application (total segregation of normal Web + commerce activity and resulting data).

It's still only a part of what a major ecommerce vendor offers, other elements being, potentially, supplier relations, purchaser guarantees, ratings and feedback systems, fraud detection (both buy and sell sides), fulfillment, physical delivery, advertising and brand awareness, lobbying, and more. Competition in these areas would remain.

Any browser-inherent features would also all but certainly move more slowly than independently developed capabilities.

Given the present browser market, it would also have to specifically appeal to Google, even Safari and Firefox are extremely distant rivals in that space. Though as noted at the top: a free-standing open shopping/commerce dedicated app might appear.

It's still quite possible an ecommerce monopolist could capture or repel such an initiative, whether in existing or new applications.

All that said, I'd encourage exploration of the idea, it's certainly occurred to me previously.

👤 gcatalfamo
If the web payments api was more used that would be a good way to do it. However, Amazon success doesn’t just rely on simple payments, but supply chain, logistics and overall ubiquity in the market. Many of those strengths can be eroded for sure, with time, but not by the corner shop alone that decides to open a Shopify store...
👤 c1c2c3
I find myself buying from Amazon for two main reasons:

1 Delivery is quick and my parcels will be left in a location selected by me - many other companies won't leave parcels. Lockers are great too, when I'm in a location that has them.

2 Great customer service

A billing/shipping API won't impact my reasons for using Amazon. I'd love to use other companies but they aren't getting the basics right at the moment.

👤 bdibs
Apple Pay does exactly this, shipping/billing address and all.
👤 kohtatsu
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...

Here's a demo:

https://applepaydemo.apple.com/

Scroll to "Try it: ApplePayPaymentRequest"

Select the Detailed Request radio button.

👤 villgax
Not everyone can take up banks for a sellers mistake
👤 buboard
Why kill amazon?