NASIR KHAN: Hi, and welcome to Google Developers Live.
My name is Nasir Khan, and I work for Google Wallet.
We are going to talk about Orbitz today.
Orbitz is one of our premiere partners.
We have done integration with Google Wallet APIs,
and we're going to go into more detail about what
they have done.
This is actually a two-part segment,
so today, we're going to focus on the Instant Buy APIs,
whereas in the following segment,
we're going to talk about Wallet Objects API, which
relates to Office.
So first of all, let me welcome Brian
who's joining us from Orbitz.
Brian, are you there?
BRIAN LEE: Yeah.
Hi.
NASIR KHAN: Hi.
How are you doing today?
BRIAN LEE: I'm doing good.
Very excited about this opportunity
to share my experience on the Instant Buy API.
How are you doing?
NASIR KHAN: I'm very well, thank you, and thanks for joining us.
So the Android app that you built
and that you included Instant Buy API with it,
can you tell us a little bit about what
it does, what the users can do with it,
and what essentially does it offer overall?
BRIAN LEE: Sure.
Our Orbitz app is the most full-featured travel booking
app available on Android today.
Not only can you search and book hotels, flights,
and rental cars, you can also access your booked itineraries,
including the ones you booked on the website.
You can also join our new Orbits Rewards Loyalty Program
directly from our app, and start earning rewards
for your booking flights, hotels,
and use it instantly on hotels.
And now with Google Wallet Instant Buy,
it's even easier to use our app to take
advantage of these great offers.
NASIR KHAN: Great, great.
So for users who are not familiar with Instant Buyer,
I would recommend them to look at a previous recording,
previous videos, but in a nutshell,
it's basically a payment API, which integrators
can use in their Android app.
And the way it works is that it makes
it really simple for the users to access their Google
Wallet from within the native app and use it for payments.
So we're going to see some examples of this going forward,
but essentially, it streamlines the process of payments
to just about two or three clicks
versus a more cumbersome entry process where users have
to enter their credit card information
and things of that kind.
So I believe you can show us the app live, Brian.
Can you?
BRIAN LEE: Yes, I can.
NASIR KHAN: All right.
So let's switch to the app right away.
Let's see what happens here.
So we can see a screen now.
Are you ready to demo?
BRIAN LEE: Sure.
Let's do a simple search for a hotel in Chicago.
So we'll click Hotel to search it, and for the destination,
we'll type Chicago.
Select Chicago, and select the dates, and click Search.
So we'll just select the first hotel, make sure we like it,
and select a room.
So when you're in the booking screen as you can see,
there's a lot of information to populate
if it's your first time booking, information like your name,
email, credit card info, and billing address.
So instead of filling everything in,
let's see what happens when we click
the Buy with Google button.
So just like that, you have a list of credit cards
you have linked in your Google Wallet,
and you can set it as a default payment method as well.
What's interesting to note here is
that this dialogue and everything in it
is actually all part of Wallet API.
I didn't have to make any of this dialogue or the content
inside.
And in fact, the Orbitz app doesn't even
have access to this list of credit cards.
All I had to do was create a masked wallet request
with the purchase amount and send it using the Google Wallet
API, which makes it really simple for me as a developer.
So now that we have this, we'll select a card
and click Continue and see what happens.
So now you can see that the billing information
is updated with your Google Wallet email
address and your funding card information.
Our Orbitz have never received the full credit card
information you have stored in Google Wallet.
We just get and show the credit card type and the last four
digits of the funding card for user reference.
And this is basically what the masked wallet object is, see it
at the travel information, it's all
pre-populated with the information
from the masked wallet.
And just like that, with just a single click,
you're ready to check out.
And since we have a promotion for using Google on Instant
Buy right now, let's just make sure to get that discount
as well.
So now when you're ready and when you click the Agree
and Book button, this is when we actually make the full wallet
request, we add a Google Wallet API.
And what this essentially does is get a single use
virtual proxy card information, which basically
gets passed on to our Orbitz back end
to be processed for payment.
NASIR KHAN: Perfect.
Thank you so much for the demo, Brian.
So as Brian was telling that there are essentially
two steps and just kind of recap that.
There is this masked wallet, which essentially happens
when the users click on the Buy with Google
button for the first time.
This is the first interaction of the users with Google Wallet,
and what they get back is this masked information,
which Brian was showing on the screen, which has the user's
address also the last four digits of their banking card.
And then when the user confirm it,
that's when a full wallet request
was made from within the app, which
gets the proxy card, which is a one-time used card, not
the card that the users have in their wallet,
but a proxy to that, which can then
be used from within the app to actually make the purchase
or make the charge on it.
And so there is a two-step very simple API, first
with the masked wallet request and then
you do a full wallet request.
And in the response, you get what
you need, which is basically a proxy card,
which you can then charge.
So the benefit of this approach is
that once you have filled out say a credit card
processing from within the app, you're accepting users,
entering their credit card, you're pretty much set up
to use Google Wallet Instant Buy because you can use
the same rails, you'll use the proxy card almost
as if the user had typed in their credit card,
and then you use it to process the charge if you're
doing the credit card process.
So the idea behind this approach was to the limit
the integration effort the developers are allowed to do,
not only in the front end, but also in the back end, which
is probably more significant because then they don't have
to really integrate anything in the back end.
So let me ask you, Brian, what I just mentioned.
Did you experience the same thing?
Did you feel that it was an easy integration,
or what are your general thoughts about integration
experience?
BRIAN LEE: As far as integration was, the happy paths where
you just had to implement a very simple use case on the Android
apps, that was really straightforward.
NASIR KHAN: Right.
At least, the hope that we had when
we developed this API was to limit the back end
changes altogether.
So is that something that you also
saw or did you have to make any changes on your back end?
BRIAN LEE: Right.
Payment processing change usually is not really
a simple change, but in this case,
the proxy card could be almost treated as like a credit card.
So we had to do some additional changes
to support a Google Wallet that it's actually a Google Wallet,
but as far as the actual process goes,
it's very just quite similar to a regular credit card payment.
NASIR KHAN: And if-- let me ask you this,
Brian-- how long did it actually take from start
to finish in terms of integrating
Instant Buy in your app?
BRIAN LEE: Well the very simple happy paths just doing the Buy
with Google and getting the aperture proxy card,
and it was actually without any error case handling
took maybe a day or two.
That was really straightforward.
In addition to that, we had to do some back end changes,
and we also had to do so edge-case handling and a lot
of testing, so the whole process took
about a few weeks, two to three weeks about,
three to four weeks, depending on how
you look at [INAUDIBLE] process.
But actually it wasn't that bad at all.
NASIR KHAN: Yeah.
That's pretty good, actually.
I mean, if you think about [INAUDIBLE]
it's a pretty big app, and in terms
of getting it live in two to three weeks with a new API,
that's pretty good.
So in terms of getting the app on the Play Store
and getting people to use it, are you seeing people
now using Instant Buy more, and do you have any feedback?
I think it's very early days, but do you
have any feedback from users?
If they're finding it easy to deal
with Instant Buy versus filling out the forms manually?
BRIAN LEE: I'm sorry.
I missed the last part of the question.
NASIR KHAN: So I was saying, it's pretty early days,
but do you have any user feedback
in terms of how the experience has been using
Instant Buy versus filling out the forms manually?
BRIAN LEE: Oh, actually when we started
the Instant Buy integration, we were actually having reviews
that people wished that we had the Google Instant
Buy integration, so it was great.
After we integrated it, we could reply to the user that hey,
we actually have this Instant Buy all and pre-populate
the forms as a really positive experience.
NASIR KHAN: Fantastic.
Thank you, Brian.
Thanks for your time today, and don't forget to tune in again
for the second segment of our video
in which we are going to talk about the Wallet Objects API.
Thank you.