Newly Launched PayPal Alternative Visa Checkout Adds Nearly A Dozen More Partners

Last month, Visa launched a new payment option designed for e-commerce transactions called Visa Checkout, which eliminates the need for entering in a 16-digit card number during the checkout process in favor of a username and password combination. Today, the company is announcing partnerships with a number of top acquirers and e-commerce platform providers, increasing Visa Checkout’s reach by another 4 million online merchants.

The new partners include Bank of America Merchant Services, First Data, TSYS, Vantiv, and Wells Fargo Merchant Services, and e-commerce platform providers including CyberSource, MarketLive, and 3DCart. These partners have now signed agreements with Visa stating they will offer Visa Checkout to their own customers. In addition, the company notes that others, including Branding Brand, Moovweb, and Skava, are already live with the service.

The service represents Visa’s second attempt at competing with the likes of PayPal by offering its own checkout solution to online merchants. Its first, a digital wallet called V.me was rebranded to become Checkout, in fact, after Visa found that consumers weren’t really connecting with the wallet experience.

“Customers don’t want a wallet,” Sam Shrauger, Visa’s SVP of Digital Solutions, said last month. “They want to be able to pay and be done with the experience.”

Of course, Visa is a delicate position with the likes of Checkout, not wanting to alienate PayPal, an important partner in terms of online transactions, many of which come through Visa payments. But the company wants to also offer its own solution.

At launch, Visa Checkout announced partnerships with a number of large online retailers, including Neiman Marcus, Pizza Hut, Staples, and United Airlines in the United States, Canada and Australia, who are adding the payment option to their e-commerce websites. But Visa never really had a problem getting sign-ups from merchants or partners before – after all, as V.me, Visa scored deals with dozens of U.S. banks, Overstock.com, 1-800-FLOWERS, LivingSocial, Newegg, and others.

The real challenge is in changing ingrained consumer behavior – users are comfortable with PayPal, which has been around for years. And there are a variety of tools, like Dashlane, LastPass or 1Password, which can speed up the more tedious manual entry of credit card info when shopping online. Visa Checkout will eventually need to do more than just be available – it will need to get online shoppers to click it instead.