Spreedly has teamed with PayPal to give customers more ways to pay.
The new integration, announced by the payments orchestration platform Tuesday (March 7) lets users make payments via PayPal’s Venmo, Pay Later, Credit and ACH tools, and comes amid rising demand for local and alternative payment methods.
“An effective payments strategy must include the right mix of payment methods to address customer preferences, regional payment needs, and a host of other considerations,” Spreedly said in a news release.
“Payments orchestration facilitates the integration to additional and local payment methods (LPMs), providing a comprehensive set of payment options for global merchants to help reach more customers, lower transaction costs, and improve conversion rates.”
The new payment methods are available to joint PayPal and Spreedly customers processing via PayPal’s Braintree service, the release notes.
As reported here last week, local and alternative payment methods — including digital wallets; online bank transfers; buy now, pay later (BNPL); and direct debit — are the most common ways for consumers to purchase goods online.
Shoppers in Europe, for example, spend more than $388 billion online per year using local payments, which are projected to make up 82% of worldwide eCommerce spend by 2024.
With that in mind, “eTailers would be wise to cater to this local and alternative payments demand, but enabling this for customers can be a tall order,” PYMNTS wrote, noting that many merchants have turned to payment orchestration to make this happen.
In an interview here last month, Spreedly’s Andy McHale argued it can be difficult for merchants to provide a variety of payment types on their own, as each method has customer-facing and back end complexities that leave little room for error.
“A lot of these alternative payment methods have different levels of consumer protection rights,” said McHale, the company’s senior director of product.
“The merchant may want to take those things into consideration as well because if there are more liberal dispute rights on a given payment method, that could expose the merchant to more risk and create more disputes on the back end.”
In the same conversation, Adrian Burgess, head of strategic growth at digital payments provider PPRO, noted that his company encounters a variety of local payment preferences, each of which carries quirks with which merchants need to deal.
“While Americans still love paying by card — around 60% of all eCommerce transactions in the U.S. are made with cards — Polish shoppers prefer bank transfer payment methods like BLIK, while in Brazil, cash-based payment methods are favored,” said Burgess.
“It’s therefore essential that merchants offer the right mix of payment methods to their consumers if they don’t want them to abandon the checkout.”