Visa Intentional has decided to rebrand its new digital wallet product from V.Me to VIsaCheckout.com stating that the name change is going to help the company “a great deal” in helping explain what the solution is about.
It was just back in November that we told you, Visa was rolling out V.Me a new service that lets you shop without sharing your card account information with the seller when you pay.””
“V.ME allows you to “make payments without sharing your card account information with the seller”, “Speed through secure checkout by entering your email address and password.”, and “Pay with any card, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover.”
Visa announced a couple of weeks ago, the change from the one letter .Me domain name to the 12 letter .com
.Me is the ccTLD extension for the country of Montenegro.
Like V.ME, , Visa Checkout is a single checkout platform that requires users to sign in with a single username and password to complete a payment process from a PC, mobile device, or within a mobile app without leaving the merchant’s website.
Greg Storey, head of Visa Checkout for Visa in Asia Pacific, Central Europe, Middle East, and Africa, told ZDNet while V.me was a “tremendous success”,
the company wanted to further reduce the complexity of online payments for both consumers and merchants, and believes the name change is going to help the company “a great deal” in helping explain what the solution is about.“What we’ve done is what you can call an evolution, but more importantly with Visa Checkout we’re focused on choosing, improving, and making the absolute best experience we can possibly give to the consumer. So the first point is creating a frictionless, simple, easy, intuitive experience for the consumer,” he said.
“We have taken away anything that distracts the consumer. The consumer should be comfortable to stay on the merchant’s website, and they should be doing their transactions on the merchant’s website without feeling like they have be taken away to some other experience whether it’s their bank or elsewhere to do a transaction. They should be able to complete a transaction there and then and make sure it’s fast and easy to do. We’ve evolved the experience because the customer needs this intuitive experience.
“We find other alternatives take the consumer away from the merchant’s website where more windows are open and take you to where you don’t really want to be. So we’re about making it simple for the consumer.”
Despite the official word that V.ME is changing to VisaCheckout.com, the domain name V.ME is now redirecting to is actually a subdomain of Visa.com;
checkout.visa.com, likewise VisaCheckout.com is redirecting to the subdomain as well.
It will be interesting to see if the .Me registry which either gave or sold the domain name V.Me to Visa we would assume under a “founders” type agreement allows Visa to keep the domain name or if they will take ot get the domain back.
So what does tjat mean exactly? Corporations know .com is better for their image or cctld’s are not as good as the .com’s, or what? I mean their has to be a good reason for them to make this change.
Shorter isn’t always better.
Steven
Well I think the spokesman for Visa chatted about the reasons for the change in the post
I gave the true reasons of this branding plunder three years ago 😀 http://domaingang.com/domain-news/v-me-visa-research-fails-to-check-british-culture-before-launch-of-paypal-alternative/
@Acro,
The point you raised may very well be part of their decision. At the very least, they ought to have considered that factor in their list of pros and cons.
Too bad for .ME. VISA would be good exposure for anybody.
Joseph 😀 I know the article might appear a bit shocking but I like thinking outside the box 😉 I’ve nothing against ccTLDs, gTLDs, domain hacks etc. but everything needs to be examined and planned carefully when using non .com focused campaigns.
Even with .COM, it’s important to look at possible ways a name can be misread — especially for an expensive purchase and a high-visibility company.
Often the list of name cons will contain possible misreadings that are pretty far fetched, and those issues most often end up being discounted. VISA might have decided that the British slang meaning wasn’t a big concern. Yet I’ve seen companies veto brand names based on much flimsier misreading issues.