Just weeks after BlueSnap’s Powered Buy Platform launched, the company has announced that Zuora, a provider of subscription billing, commerce and finance solutions for merchants, has integrated the global checkout option.
As the global eCommerce market continues to grow — estimated to grow 25 percent in 2015 alone — the ability to reach international shoppers is growing at a rapid rate. By integrating BlueSnap’s Powered Buy Platform into Zuora’s platform, it enables Zuora’s merchants across 180 countries to have access to a checkout experience that BlueSnap claims can increase conversions by 40 percent. Because BlueSnap’s platform automatically routes transactions to multiple acquiring banks globally, it helps ensure the payment goes through properly.
“We integrated with BlueSnap’s Powered Buy Platform with the goal of helping our customers reach more shoppers worldwide,” said Guillaume Vives, senior vice president at Zuora. “As a company with a global mission, their connection to banks around the world and their positive track record of payment conversions made them an appealing partner and will benefit our customers by increasing their sales.”
BlueSnap’s Powered Buy Platform provides flexible integration to a checkout experience that helps merchants get those customers checking out. Powered Buy offers merchants access to APIs or a turnkey-embedded checkout page. It has something it calls a “smart payments gateway” that has acquiring connections to multiple local banks around the world through a single integration that also includes failover to maximize payment authorizations. The Powered Buy Platform also offers value-added features that merchants find critical for engaged and secure eCommerce, such as offers and coupons, subscription billing, fraud prevention and chargeback management.
“Zuora has built an impressive list of clients needing a complex recurring billing solution. Now, those customers can leverage our Powered Buy Platform for maximized payment conversions to increase sales around the world,” said Jeff Coppolo, SVP of global business development at BlueSnap. “Zuora makes it simple for merchants to select our Platform and be up and running in minutes without having to build their own integration.”
Most recently, the Powered Buy Platform has garnered support from the world’s two largest payments networks, MasterCard and Visa, who share BlueSnap’s commitment to a frictionless digital shopping and buying experience for merchants and consumers. In a recent interview, BlueSnap CEO Ralph Dangelmaier told MPD CEO Karen Webster that they are each funding the integration of their digital “buy buttons” into the Powered Buy Platform.
BlueSnap’s commitment to reducing this conversion problem for merchants is also at the core of the newly launched Checkout Conversion Index (CCI), which will benchmark quarterly how well merchants are optimizing their mobile checkout experience. Done in collaboration with PYMNTS, the first CCI report analyzes more than 650 online sites across 14 physical and digital merchant categories representing 70 percent of the eCommerce market. The initial index reports that, overall, merchants are performing only marginally better than average, with an index score this quarter of 62.
Dangelmaier told Webster that BlueSnap’s work with merchants over the years has uncovered what he calls a “payments conversion” problem that can cost an online merchant as much as 40 percent of their sales when customers encounter friction at checkout and abandon their virtual carts.
“Payments is about the last thing that online merchants want to think about — their first, second and third priorities are to get customers to visit their virtual storefronts and buy from them,” Dangelmaier said. “But mobile-toting consumers are now forcing merchants to focus on the role that payments, and payments conversions, now play in delivering those priorities.”
A major issue for merchants, Dangelmaier said, is that most merchants don’t even know that they have a payments conversion problem — yet they suffer from its symptoms daily. A payments conversion problem that Dangelmaier said prevents these online merchants from turning their global, mobile shoppers into buyers and customers for life.
“Most merchants don’t recognize that they have a problem, because they don’t have the data to help them fully grasp just how serious it is,” Dangelmaier explains. “They see unexplained and above average decline rates for website visitors, abandoned shopping carts and/or high bounce rates when shoppers land on their sites and immediately leave. But most of the time, they assume that the problem is related to how their product is priced or what merchandise they carry. That’s wrong most of the time. Most of the time, what they really have is a payments conversion problem.”
BlueSnap launched its Powered Buy Platform on Cyber Monday, one of the busiest online shopping days all year, in order to draw attention to the “payments conversion problem” that is the Powered Buy Platform’s raison d’être.
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