Re: [w3c/payment-handler] Why does a Payment App need to see the line items? (#91)

@marcoscaceres wrote:

> Not sure what you mean by “up lift”? Could you please clarify?

Increase in conversion rate.

A merchant might say: "Huh, sharing this payment item with the payment app makes the user at ease and fewer users abandon the transaction, so I'm willing the share this piece of information with the payment app, because it's beneficial to me."

> The problem is that what people buy is not up to the merchant to share - it’s for the user to share: but most users won’t understand how dangerous and ripe for abuse that is. Likewise, merchants probably won’t ever want to share that information either.

The intent here is for the merchant to explain the price to the user without revealing the shopping cart contents to the payment app. Let's say you're shopping for a $9.99 sweater, click on checkout, and the payment app is showing $15.99. Where did that $6.00 addition came from? The user is very likely to abondong the transaction if the merchant does not break it down into $9.99 subtotal, $3.00 tax, $2.00 tax, and $1.00 donation to charity, or what have you. The payment app does not find out what exactly the user is buying, but the user is at ease in knowing that the price difference is not a bug.

> The user needs to see the tax, sub-total, etc. which the browser can show them - but tax, shipping cost, and sub-total are none of the payment handler’s business (in a very literal sense).

In some cases, the payment handler and the browser are the same entity, so sharing with one is equivalent with sharing with the other.

In the case of 3rd party payment handlers, the browser cannot necessarily show these items to the user. Let's take tax as an example. If the user changes the billing address inside of the payment handler, the "paymentmethodchange" event will be fired for the merchant, the merchant will calculate the updated tax, and send that back to the payment handler. The user is already inside of the payment handler at this point, so it would be the payment handler that's displaying the tax.

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