The World Wide Web Consortium has been working on technology standards for the open web for more than 25 years.
Founded by Tim Berners-Lee, its mission is to lead World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web.
In the last five years, it has swung its attention to how payments are made online, forming a working group to develop new standards that include the Payment Request API, a protocol now shipping in Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox that supports a standard way for websites to initiate payments.
But standards work can be highly technical and inaccessible for a wider audience, and we heard consistent feedback from merchants and advocacy groups, including MAG, that we needed a different forum that catered for people who sell online, where their concerns, issues and challenges could be heard and discussed.
In October, we were pleased to announce the launch of the Merchant Business Group, a forum for online merchants to come together and discuss their use cases. The mission of the Merchant Business Group is to improve the Web for people and organizations that sell goods or services or accept donations online. This includes both business-to-business (B2B) merchants, business-to-consumer (B2C) merchants as well as not-for-profit donation acceptors. In this non-technical forum, participants will discuss merchant challenges, how emerging Web technologies could help address them, and what additional Web capabilities may be necessary.
Likely topics include:
- Customer interaction, capture and retention via accessible immersive Web experiences
- Web checkout experiences, including the value merchants should gain with W3C's Web payments standards
- Emerging regulatory requirements (e.g., related to privacy or accessibility) and ensuring good customer experience
- The evolution of Web advertising
- Good practices for reducing online fraud
- Enhancements to transaction integrity and assurance
- Improving mobile Web commerce experiences
Co-chaired by Melanie O’Brien of Coles Supermarket Group and John O’Brien of Worldpay by FIS, we are actively seeking participation and engagement with the merchant community. Come and talk to us about your needs and frustrations – our hope is to create a forum where vendors like the browser vendors, card schemes, and payment providers can hear feedback which can shape new developments in both standards at the w3.org, and in their own service offerings.
As an introductory offer, and to recognize the key role that MAG has played in advocating for its creation, members of MAG that join the Merchant Business Group before January 1, 2021, get a 15% discount to the business group membership fee. MAG members that are already W3C members can join the group for free as part of their existing membership.
To find out more, please contact Nick Telford-Reed or Karen Myers.