November 30, 2015- WALTHAM, Mass.--BlueSnap announces today the launch of its Powered Buy Platform, a next-generation global payment gateway that makes mobile checkout frictionless for consumers and integration to the platform simple for online merchants. In a world in which commerce is moving online at an unprecedented pace, BlueSnap’s Powered Buy Platform can help merchants optimize that commerce opportunity and increase their conversions by as much as 40 percent.
“Converting a shopper to a buyer on a mobile device requires more than just having a mobile-optimized site or an app,” says Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap. “We’ve spent the last year optimizing the set of capabilities that merchants need to solve their payments conversion problem — and built that into our Powered Buy Platform. Clients who’ve used it have seen their payment conversions increase dramatically – improving their sales literally overnight.”
The launch of the Powered Buy Platform on Cyber Monday, one of the busiest online shopping days all year, is intended to shine a bright light on what BlueSnap has identified as the “Payments Conversion Problem” – the friction at checkout that BlueSnap estimates can cost a merchant up to 40 percent of their sales. With Cyber Monday sales expected to top $3.2 billion, merchants stand to lose more than $1.2 billion.
The Powered Buy Platform provides flexible integration, empowering merchants to deploy the best checkout experience to engage their customers – from API to turnkey embedded checkout. Acquiring connections to multiple local banks around the world are provided through a single integration along with failover to maximize payment authorizations. The platform also offers value-added features such as dynamic eCommerce tools, including offers and coupons, subscription billing, fraud prevention and chargeback management.
Powered Buy Platform Garners Support From The World’s Largest Card Networks
MasterCard and Visa are each working with BlueSnap to fund the integration to their online checkout options, MasterPass and Visa Checkout, respectively, into the Powered Buy Platform.
“Merchants know that they’re losing sales from mobile customers, but they don’t know how to stop the bleeding or even where to start,” said Amy Dawson, Head of Merchant and Partner Development for Digital Solutions at Visa. “Our integration into BlueSnap’s Powered Buy Platform helps meet our commitment to offering merchants a powerful and frictionless checkout experience. Adding Visa Checkout to the BlueSnap platform gives merchants easy access to a payments option that millions of consumers like and use to pay online.”
“As every device is quickly becoming a commerce device, we want to ensure that consumers have a seamless experience with a retailer whether that interaction is in-person, online or via mobile,” said Michael Cyr, group executive, Market Development, MasterCard. “Key to this is driving acceptance to ensure cardholders can use their cards when, where and how they want. By integrating MasterPass into the BlueSnap platform, online merchants are able to deliver a simplified checkout experience helping convert browsers into buyers.”
How Merchants Benefit From The Powered Buy Platform
AppDirect is a market leader in the cloud services sector and widely regarded as powering the reinvention of the global app economy. AppDirect was in search of a solution that made it easier for cloud-based commerce services to be bought and sold. Paul Arnautoff, Director of Business Development for AppDirect, says that “integrating with the Powered Buy Platform makes it possible for our customers to offer frictionless checkout for their shoppers and overcome the checkout abandonment issues that have created problems for them in the past.”
Sizing The Market Need
BlueSnap’s work with merchants over the last year sheds new light on the degree of checkout conversion issues by quantifying the lost revenue problems they create for merchants. For instance, BlueSnap data shows that shoppers abandon at checkout 30% of the time when consumers are not able to use their preferred checkout method, including local payment schemes such as China’s Alipay or Brazil’s Boleto, coupon codes, or local language and currency. In other cases, payments are declined if a merchant isn’t connecting to multiple acquiring banks, something that is increasingly important as more buyers engage in cross-border eCommerce.
In collaboration with PYMNTS.com, BlueSnap has launched The Checkout Conversion Index (CCI), which will benchmark quarterly how well merchants are optimizing their global, mobile checkout experience. The Index reflects the assessment of more than 650 online sites across 14 merchant categories, representing 70 percent of the eCommerce market. Overall, merchants are performing marginally better than average, with an Index score this quarter of 62. The full report can be downloaded here.
