Visa wants to make the process of paying forgoods on your phone or iPad as easy as swiping your credit or debitcard at an offline retailer.

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To do so, it's adapting to Internet retail with the launchof Visa Checkout, a new payment option thatwill allow users to speed through the online checkout process injust a few steps.

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Visa is introducing a username and passwordsystem for making payments, which would eliminate the need to entera 16-digit credit card number.

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“Merchants want to sell, they want to convert cardholders tosales,” said Sam Shrauger, Visa's senior vice president of digitalsolutions, at an event announcing the launch. “People want to buy,people want to enjoy what they're buying. What they don't want tospend their time doing is paying.”

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Visa isn't the first to do this, of course. PayPal has offereda similar payment option for years, and morerecently Amazon launcheda competing payment button.

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But Visa was careful to make it sound like it wasn't competingwith PayPal for these payments. CEO CharlesScharf called PayPal an “important partner” to Visa because manyPayPal transactions are also paid for on Visa cards.

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“We like those transactions,” he said. “But we shouldn't have torely on anyone else.”

Shrauger said the current arduous process often detersusers from making purchases on small phone screens, with 86 percentof users abandoning shopping carts on mobile devices. Read thecomplete TechCruncharticle to learn more about VisaCheckout.