Updates to the Web Payments APIs

Stay up to date on what's new in Web Payments.

Jun 13, 2019

Rouslan Solomakhin

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Danyao Wang

Twitter

Eiji Kitamura

Twitter GitHub Homepage

Web Payments have been publicly available in browsers since 2016. The core feature—the Payment Request API—is now available across multiple browsers: Chrome, Safari, Edge and soon Firefox. If you're new to Web Payments take a look at the "Web Payments Overview" to get started.

Since the launch of the Payment Request API and the Payment Handler API, there have been quite a few changes made to their respective specifications. These changes won't break your working code, but we recommend that you look out for them. This post summarizes those updates and will continue accumulating those API changes.

New method: hasEnrolledInstrument() #

In the previous version of the Payment Request API, canMakePayment() was used to check for the user's presence of the user's payment instrument. In a recent update to the spec, canMakePayment() has been replaced with hasEnrolledInstrument() without changing its functionality.

The hasEnrolledInstrument() method has consensus from all major browsers. Chrome has implemented it in version 74 and both Webkit and Gecko have tracking bugs but have not yet implemented the method as of June 2019.

To use the new hasEnrolledInstrument() method, replace code that looks like this:

// Checking for instrument presence.
request.canMakePayment().then(handleInstrumentPresence).catch(handleError);

With code that looks like this:

// Checking for instrument presence.
if (request.hasEnrolledInstrument) {
  // hasEnrolledInstrument() is available.
  request.hasEnrolledInstrument().then(handleInstrumentPresence).catch(handleError);
} else {
  request.canMakePayment().then(handleInstrumentPresence).catch(handleError);
}

canMakePayment() no longer checks for instrument presence #

Because hasEnrolledInstrument() now handles checking for the user's payment instrument, canMakePayment() has been updated to only check for payment app availability.

This change to canMakePayment() is bound to the implementation of hasEnrolledInstrument(). As of June 2019, it is implemented in Chrome 74 but not in any other browsers. Be sure to check if the hasEnrolledInstrument() method is available in the user's browser before attempting to use it.

// Checking for payment app availability without checking for instrument presence.
if (request.hasEnrolledInstrument) {
  // `canMakePayment()` behavior change corresponds to
  // `hasEnrolledInstrument()` availability.
  request.canMakePayment().then(handlePaymentAppAvailable).catch(handleError);
} else {
  console.log("Cannot check for payment app availability without checking for instrument presence.");
}

languageCode removed from basic-card payment method #

PaymentAddress.languageCode has been removed from the shipping addresses and billing addresses for basic-card. The billing addresses of other payment methods (such as Google Pay) are not affected.

This change has been implemented in Chrome 74, Firefox, and Safari.

PaymentRequest.show() now takes an optional detailsPromise #

PaymentRequest.show() allows a merchant to present a payment request UI before the final total is known. The merchant has ten seconds to resolve the detailsPromise before a timeout. This feature is intended for a quick server-side roundtrip.

This feature has shipped in Chrome 75 and Safari.

// Not implemented in Chrome 74 and older.
// There's no way to feature-detect this, so check a few
// older versions of Chrome that you're seeing hit your servers.
if (/Chrome\/((6[0-9])|(7[0-4]))/g.exec(navigator.userAgent) !== null) {
  return;
}

// Supported in Chrome 75+.
request.show(new Promise(function(resolveDetailsPromise, rejectDetailsPromise) {
  // Find out the exact total amount and call
  // `resolveDetailsPromise(details)`.
  // Use a 3 second timeout as an example.
  window.setTimeout(function() {
    resolveDetailsPromise(details);
  }, 3000); // 3 seconds.
}))
.then(handleResponse)
.catch(handleError);

PaymentRequestEvent.changePaymentMethod() #

The Payment Handler API feature PaymentRequestEvent.changePaymentMethod() allows payment handlers (e.g., Google Pay) to trigger the onpaymentmethodchange event handler. changePaymentMethod() returns a promise that resolves to a merchant response with updated price information (e.g., tax recalculation).

Both PaymentRequestEvent.changePaymentMethod() and the paymentmethodchange event are available in Chrome 76 and Webkit has implemented the paymentmethodchange event in its Technology Preview.

// In service worker context, `self` is the global object.
self.addEventListener('paymentrequest', (evt) => {
  evt.respondWith(new Promise((confirmPaymentFunction, rejectPaymentFunction) => {
    if (evt.changePaymentMethod === undefined) {
      // Not implemented in this version of Chrome.
      return;
    }
    // Notify merchant that the user selected a different payment method.
    evt.changePaymentMethod('https://paymentapp.com', {country: 'US'})
    .then((responseFromMerchant) => {
      if (responseFromMerchant === null) {
        // Merchant ignored the 'paymentmethodchange' event.
        return;
      }
      handleResponseFromMerchant(responseFromMerchant);
    })
    .catch((error) => {
      handleError(error);
    });
  }));
});

Merchant example:

if (request.onpaymentmethodchange === undefined) {
  // Feature not available in this browser.
  return;
}

request.addEventListener('paymentmethodchange', (evt) => {
  evt.updateWith(updateDetailsBasedOnPaymentMethod(evt, paymentDetails));
});

Improved local development #

Chrome 76 adds two small improvements for developer productivity. If your local development environment uses a self-signed certificate, you can now use the --ignore-certificate-errors command line flag to make Chrome allow Web Payments APIs in your development environment. If you develop using a local web server that does not support HTTPS, you can also use the --unsafely-treat-insecure-origin-as-secure=<origin> flag to make Chrome treat the HTTP origin as HTTPS.