An invisible payment only works when the shopper has already agreed to the charge
Payments Dive published a primer on embedded payments on 13 August 2024, and it starts from a familiar example. Uber stores a rider’s card once, when the account is created, and bills every later trip without asking for it again. The article calls that one of the earliest forms of embedded payments, where paying is built into an app or website so smoothly that the shopper hardly notices the moment of paying. Executives from payment firms and banks, an analyst firm and a consultancy describe a market moving in that direction, and the article cites a Juniper Research projection from April 2024 that the global embedded finance market will grow from $92 billion in 2024 to $228 billion in 2028.
That projection says something about the providers selling embedded finance. It says nothing about how shoppers in your checkout behave. The Uber example is the more useful part, and it is easy to misread. What disappears in a ride app is the act of paying, not the agreement. The rider accepted the arrangement once, when they signed up and handed over their details, and every later charge carries out that decision. A webshop that removes its payment step without that prior agreement removes the one moment the shopper uses to check what they are about to pay.
The payment step disappears only where the purchase repeats
Embedded payment fits a relationship, not a single order. A ride, a subscription, a refill, a reorder of the same consumables: in each case the shopper has decided once what they buy and on what terms. Most webshop orders work differently. The basket changes, the delivery date changes, the total changes, and the payment step is where the shopper sees all of it together for the first time. Taking that step out of a one-off purchase does not take out friction. It takes out the check.
That gives a simple test for any part of your journey where you want to make paying invisible. Has the shopper agreed in advance to what will be charged and when? If they have, as with a subscription at a fixed price and interval, an automatic charge is the service they signed up for. If they have not, a fast confirmation serves them better than no confirmation at all: the total, the delivery promise and the payment method on one screen, and one button to place the order.
Keeping the shopper on your site matters more than hiding the payment
The point in the article that applies to almost every webshop comes from Todd Pollak, chief revenue officer at Marqeta. In his view the shopper saves time when the payment happens inside the brand’s own environment, rather than on a separate payment site the shopper is sent to. A shopper who leaves your page, lands on an unfamiliar screen and has to find the way back meets doubt, time-outs and lost baskets at the last step before the order.
The Dutch market adds a twist. Its leading method is built on a confirmed trip to the bank. iDEAL accounts for 71% of all online purchases, according to the Dutch Payments Association, and every iDEAL payment is approved by the shopper with their own bank. The move to Wero keeps that. When iDEAL announced in October 2025 that it would rebrand to iDEAL | Wero from 2026, it stated that the familiar steps of selecting a bank and approving the payment remain the same. A Dutch shopper expects to confirm each payment and trusts the method partly because of it.
The design task in that market is not to hide the step but to keep the round trip short and predictable. Name the method with its current logo so the shopper knows where they are going. Make sure the return from the bank lands on the order with the basket and delivery choice intact, on mobile as well as desktop. Show on the confirmation page straight away whether the payment went through, and if it did not, offer another method on the same screen.
Make the arrangement visible before you make the payment invisible
Where your range does lend itself to repeat charges, the lesson of the Uber model is that the charge can be quiet only because everything around it is clear. A shopper who has agreed to recurring orders needs to see, at any time, what is stored, when the next charge falls, for what amount, and how to change the method or stop. They need a message after each charge that ties the amount to an order they recognise. Without those, a charge the shopper did not see coming reaches their bank statement as a surprise, and a surprise on a statement turns into a question to your customer service or a disputed payment.
Wero itself is moving towards this territory. The same iDEAL announcement says Wero is designed to support payments for subscriptions, pay-on-delivery services and in-store purchases. It gave no date for that. EPI has since said that recurring payments and subscription management will be offered in 2026, and some French customers already pay their invoices with Wero. Until the function works in your own checkout, the recurring part of a Dutch range runs on the methods that already support it there.
Start with an inventory. List every place in your journey where a payment runs, or could run, without the shopper actively confirming it: subscriptions, automatic reorders, one-click buying with stored details. For each one, check three things from the shopper’s side. The amount and timing were agreed before the first charge. A message follows every charge with the amount and the order it belongs to. The shopper can change the method or end the arrangement in their account without having to contact you. Wherever one of these is missing, close that gap first. Only then is it worth removing another step from the checkout.
Sources: paymentsdive.com, betaalvereniging.nl, ideal.nl, epicompany.eu
