The phrase “seamless checkout” has been used so much to describe so many things that the meaning has gotten foggy. But given what’s at stake, this murkiness is far from optimal for consumers and merchants, and it’s the kind of thing Deepak Sharma, vice president and head of payments and risk engineering at eBay, spends a lot of time thinking about.
“Our goal is to make sure our users can go through these payments in the [fastest] and most frictionless way possible,” he said. It’s to “make sure people spend the least amount of time thinking about paying for stuff” as payment is incidental to the matter despite its importance.
Sharma’s comments were made as part of PYMNTS’ Nuvei Merchant Payments Optimization Series, in which he also shared how there’s more to seamlessness than just speed, given that the original online marketplace works with 134 million customers in 190 countries.
In fact, Sharma said that in a time of high cybertheft, properly placed friction is a necessary and valuable tool for both buyer and seller, saying that’s a message that all parties involved in a transaction must understand and appreciate.
“When we suspect that there is some fraudulent payment in play, we like to put some friction in front of the users to make sure they can validate that it is them, that their financial data is secure. That, I think, is a balancing act,” he said, because, in many cases, it is true fraud.
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Considering that eBay built a huge part of its reputation on reCommerce, and statistics widely place preowned items at about 39% of its sales volume, “seamless” becomes a function of trusting not just payment security but item authenticity, especially in cross-border eCommerce.
Noting that 2022 “Cyber 5” selling days saw eBay move a record amount of refurbished electronics, he said, “We have made a lot of strides to ensure that the trust of the purchase for the buyer is at the highest level.”
A prime example is eBay’s Authenticity Guarantee program that verifies “used sneakers, watches, bags, and other preloved products, that those products are authenticated by eBay, and you can rest assured that it is the right product that you are purchasing. That’s an important problem to solve in the purchase and payment experience overall,” he said.
That protects the buyer, widening the aperture on terms like seamless to include purchase satisfaction and trust after the fact. But what’s in it for sellers?
Saying that making sure sellers can access their funds quickly and in their preferred currency, Sharma added, “We have invested heavily in making sure our sellers have the choice of getting access to their funds daily, weekly, monthly, even on demand. In some markets, we have enabled access to funds within minutes if you want to transfer that money using a debit card.”
While touting the benefits of buyer payment and seller payout choice, he said that choice for the sake of it “really doesn’t help anybody. You don’t want to throw the kitchen sink at everybody. For us, it’s all about relevance and what matters to you. We want to make sure that we are locally relevant to [each] market.”
However, recalling a collectible Mickey Mantle trading card that recently sold on eBay for $50,000, he defined another facet of “seamless” as the ability to buy high-ticket items by splitting the purchase between cards if need be, saying, “It’s the combination of these two, making sure you’re locally relevant to the customer and making sure that in the context for the item that you’re purchasing, the right form of payment is available to you.”
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Given the 134 million users on the platform, eBay studied its sellers and came up with the notion of the “accidental entrepreneur,” who discovers how simple it is to set up an account and start selling. Here again, the idea of seamless has meaningful nuances.
“The ease of getting started on eBay makes it attractive for customers to come and experiment,” Sharma said. Once they do, it’s eBay’s task to have tools to make sure that sellers can scale and grow their businesses. “That’s where we’re investing healthy as well,” he said, “making sure we can offer access to the right set of financial and value-added services to our customers so they can scale their business effectively.”
That opens yet another side of seamlessness, which is knowing platform users through transaction data selling histories to create easier access to working capital.
He said, “If you are a growing seller, it’s very hard to get access to working capital. We at eBay are in the unique position of knowing what our sellers do at a very deep level so we can provide them with differentiated working capital, embedded within their selling experiences.”
Whether buying or selling, using eBay programs like Authenticity Guarantee, working capital access, or its Refurbished Program that’s keeping waste out of the environment while turning a profit, Sharma said this innovation combines for a more accurate definition of seamlessness.
As part of that, he said it’s important to remember that sometimes “things fail.”
That means “making sure that the messaging of why things are failing is super clear to the users and that they have a way to remediate those errors” supports its payments innovation agenda.
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