WePay, an online and mobile payments technology and services vendor, has become the first payments provider to include Google Wallet Instant Buy in its offerings. To date, retailers interested in incorporating the speedy mobile checkout payments option from Google had to work directly with Google to integrate the checkout option into their sites and apps. WePay’s Google Wallet Instant Buy support is available to WePay clients and does not require additional integration work.

Consumers who have their payment credentials stored in a Google Wallet account can pay any merchant that accepts Google Wallet in as few as two clicks or touches.

“We care about the payment method that consumers prefer to use and that retailers are most successful with—the more consumers that get through the checkout process safely and securely, the more revenue in our merchants’ pockets,” says WePay co-founder and chief product officer Rich Aberman. “Both Google Wallet and Apple Pay have open application programming interfaces, or APIs. But only Apple allows any payments provider, like WePay, to take that API and fully support Apple Pay on behalf of merchant clients without integration at the merchant level. Merchants do not have to work directly with Apple. Today, with the exception of working through WePay, if a merchant wants to use Google Wallet, the merchant has to work directly with Google when integrating the Google Wallet API.”

Essentially, Google has granted WePay special early access to Google Wallet Instant Buy, piloting a new distribution model for Google Wallet, which is to work through payments companies to expand the presence of Google Wallet in online and mobile retail, Haberman says.

“This no doubt is the first step in a new strategy for Google,” he says. “Google looks at Apple Pay and sees there are other solid ways to get distribution, like through companies like WePay that do a good job negotiating risk. I would be very surprised if Google does not open Google Wallet Instant Buy to other companies like Braintree in the future. The success of Google Wallet will depend on the number of consumers who use it to pay and the number of merchants that accept it.”

While Apple Pay hogs the mobile payments spotlight, Google Wallet is a relevant and established player and will become increasingly important given the success of Google’s Android mobile operating system and Google’s increased focus on payments, Aberman says.

Invoicing platform InvoiceASAP is the first WePay client to adopt the new service, instantly enabling its more than 200,000 small business customers to accept Google Wallet. InvoiceASAP is a mobile invoicing platform that helps small businesses create and send professional invoices. Last year, InvoiceASAP became a WePay client to help make it easier for its business clients to accept payments online, says Paul Hoeper, founder and CEO of InvoiceASAP.

“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to pay and get paid,” Hoeper says. “But there’s only so much we can do on mobile. Entering your credit card information on a mobile device is difficult, making it less likely that people will complete their transactions.”

WePay hopes integrating Google Wallet Instant Buy into its web-hosted payments platform will make mobile checkout much less difficult. WePay does not charge clients for Google Wallet Instant Buy integration and support. WePay charges clients 2.9% plus 30 cents for every online and mobile transaction; that covers all payments services a client requests.

Follow Bill Siwicki, editor of the 2015 Internet Retailer Mobile 500 and editor, mobile, at Internet Retailer, at @IRmcommerce and at @MobileInsiderBS.

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