While 68% of Millennial consumers bought something via a marketplace in the last year, 51% will still abandon a checkout page if it takes too long, according to a recent Nielsen and Stripe study. Bonanza, an online marketplace where shoppers can buy and sell both regular goods and collectibles ranging from shoes to pet supplies to garden gnomes, sought to eliminate such friction within its checkout process by integrating the Stripe online payments platform.
“As mobile shopping is positioned more at the forefront of e-Commerce and web sites go more into the background, buyers need to have a frictionless experience at checkout,” said Mark Dorsey, Co-Founder and VP of Business Development at Bonanza in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “When you are visiting a site on your mobile phone and you go to checkout, and then you’re prompted to log into a PayPal account or a checkout by Amazon account if you haven’t already done so, it creates an extra step. That could result in a lost cart. It’s little things like that which make a difference.”
Initially, checkout via Stripe will be offered to sellers who have a Gold membership or higher. The Gold membership is designed for beginning sellers and costs $300 per year.
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It was seller feedback that drove the Stripe integration. In 2017, Bonanza launched a Seller Survey and discovered that 31% of sellers voted to add Stripe as a payments option, on top of existing services including PayPal and Amazon Pay. That number was 18 percentage points higher than the next most popular payment provider requested.
“We’re a very seller-focused marketplace,” Dorsey said. “We’re always looking for solutions that empower sellers, and feedback has always been important to us since day one. We get a lot of feedback via emails, and we provide a lot of areas on the site for feedback. Our seller community made their voices heard that they wanted to add Stripe. That really quantified us to have a serious look at updating our payments services.”
With a growing international business, Bonanza hopes to welcome new sellers overseas that aren’t able to use PayPal or Amazon Pay. Stripe is available to sellers based in more than 20 countries, and can process payments from a variety of payment cards such as Visa, Mastercard and American Express.
Sellers can create a Stripe account by visiting their Payments & Purchases settings in Bonanza. Existing Stripe customers can connect their Bonanza account directly on Stripe. New sellers joining Bonanza will be able to opt in during the booth activation process.
Stripe will charge 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, though sellers can reach out to Stripe’s support team to discuss their options. There are no additional fees from Bonanza aside from the final value fees, and Bonanza has assured sellers that nothing about its billing processes will change. In the event of a payment dispute or a refund, the company handles those issues directly from Stripe’s dashboard.
“You don’t want to have a payment service that does not provide good fraud protection, because that will turn into a Wild West situation,” Dorsey said. “There’s all kinds of opportunists that are looking for payment providers that don’t provide such protection.”
Dorsey emphasized that Bonanza is well-positioned within its sector through the Stripe integration, because it is an example of the marketplace’s ability to focus on details designed to create a frictionless customer experience.
“There are a lot of marketplaces out there that receive large rounds of investment that fail, because they don’t pay attention to things like payments,” Dorsey said. “They think that advertising is the way to go and that they have to advertise their site via commercials. They don’t pay attention to the details and I think that attitude is why they’re no longer operating. You’re going to see companies continue to look for the easy route, and those companies will find out that that’s not the success way to go. Buyers want instant gratification, they don’t want friction.”