Selecting Payment Mechanisms Over HTTP

The Joint Electronics Payment Initiative aims to bring key industry players together to assure that multiple payment protocols can operate effectively in Web applications. The concrete goal is automatable payment selection over HTTP. The first step towards this was Don Eastlake's development of the Universal Payment Preamble, which is also available as an internet-draft (draft-eastlake-universal-payment). The second is the development of an HTTP Extension Protocol to embed UPP in HTTP. The latter proposal is part of the chartered activities of the IETF HTTP WG (draft-ietf-http-pep-03). This document describes how to use UPP over PEP to support payment selection between clients and merchants. It explains basic operations: requesting available payment choices, presenting multiple choices, demanding a selection, making a selection, and accepting and rejecting choices.