W3C is expanding its Web Payments discussions to encompass Web Commerce.
We have been doing a bit of this already, exploring digital offers, digital receipts, and in-car payments. A proposed Web Commerce Interest Group charter more clearly invites participants to study use cases and requirements for omni-channel commerce, invisible payments, loyalty programs and coupons, virtual reality payments, fraud mitigation, and more.
The co-Chairs —David Ezell (NACS), Ken Mealey (American Express), and Dapeng Liu (Alibaba)— and I expect the broader Commerce focus will further reinvigorate participation. I think we will succeed if:
- we identify business use cases that the W3C Members care about,
- we make it easy for people to elaborate those use cases to the point where we understand whether the Web would need new capabilities to fulfill those use cases.
Personally I find it challenging to start with business use cases and end up with a thorough (Web technology) gap analysis. To do this well, we will need a mix of participants: those with industry expertise and those with an understanding of Web architecture. We achieved that alchemy in 2015, leading to enthusiastic support to “streamlined checkout” as the mission of the Web Payments Working Group. At that point, a number of the Web technologists then (happily) began to focus on the deliverables of the Working Group, another reason that we are broadening the scope of the Interest Group. I hope to re-establish a productive business/technology mix through this rechartering.
If all goes well, the Web Commerce Interest Group will launch mid-September and hold its first face-to-face meeting on 9-10 November during TPAC 2017. What use cases would you like to see us prioritize? And more importantly: will you join us to help drive the work?