The mission of the Web Payments Working Group, part of the Web Payments Activity, is to make payments easier and more secure on the Web. See the goals below and the charter for more information. See also the Developer Portal for introductions, code examples, and more developer resources. The Working Group has also published a FAQ.

Questions? Contact Ian Jacobs <[email protected]>.

Deliverables

Formally Adopted by the Working Group and in Development

• Secure Payment Confirmation: Secure Payment Confirmation (SPC) is a Web API to support streamlined authentication during a payment transaction. It is designed to scale authentication across merchants, to be used within a wide range of authentication protocols, and to produce cryptographic evidence that the user has confirmed transaction details.
• Payment Request API: This specification describes a web API to allow merchants (i.e., web sites selling physical or digital goods) to easily accept payments from different payment methods with minimal integration. User agents (e.g. browsers) will facilitate the payment flow between merchant and user.
  • The Working Group is developing an implementation report. See also tests with fewer than two implementations from that report.
  • As of early 2019 we are starting to identify features for the specification after v1
• Payment Method Identifiers: This Recommendation-track document defines payment method identifier strings so that components in the payment ecosystem can determine which parties support which payment methods.
• Payment Handler API: This specification third party payment apps to the Payment Request API ecosystem. It defines how users register payment apps with user agents, how user agents support the display of information about payment options the user can select to handle the payment request, how the user selects a payment app, and how communication takes place between user agents and payment apps to fulfill the requirements of the underlying Payment Request API. This specification is being developed within the Payment Apps Task Force.
• Payment Method Manifest, which payment method owners publish to describe the software ecosystem for a payment method.

No Longer In Development

• Basic Card
• Secure Remote Commerce (SRC)
• Credit Transfer: This specification describes the data formats used by the Payment Request API to support payment by credit transfers (e.g., via SEPA, BACS, ACH, CHAPS, etc.).
• Tokenized Card Payment, which describes the data formats used by the PaymentRequest API to support payment by tokenized payment cards. See the Tokenization wiki.
• Payment Method Encryption. See the the Tokenization wiki.
• 3D Secure; see early draft of 3-D Secure 2 with Payment Request API.
• A Web Payments Overview describes the Web Payments Working Group view of its work.
• Web Payments HTTP API 1.0 and Web Payments HTTP Messages 1.0 which describe how to initiate payments outside of a browser.
  • Issues lists for HTTP API and Messages
• See additional proposals not yet taken up by the WG.

Milestones

The group anticipates the following:

• Payment Request API: Recommendation by Q4 2021.
• Payment Method Identifiers: Recommendation by Q4 2021.
• Tokenized Card Payment: CR by Q3 2022.

How the Working Group Works

Working Group participants hold regular meetings, for which proceedings are public. The Working Group uses Github to manage the majority of the group's activity, notably for specifications, issues, and actions. However, a small number of actions are at times recorded in the W3C action tracking tool. Read more about how the Working Group works.

Good reading

• Architecture of the World Wide Web
• Web Platform Design Principles
• Ethical Web Principles
• Security and Privacy Self-Review Questionnaire
• Mitigating Browser Fingerprinting in Web Specifications
• TAG Findings
• HTML Design Principles