Unlocking the next wave of growth for marketplaces and payment facilitators

Platforms are taking over the world, meeting pent-up demand and unlocking new transaction behavior globally. Whether it’s DressX providing NFT clothing for Meta’s new avatar fashion marketplace or Teachers Pay Teachers arming stressed teachers with downloadable lesson plans, the expansion of the platform economy presents a massive opportunity for operators to grow their revenues. In this new reality, sellers are empowered with choice. Competition to recruit, grow and, most importantly, keep star sellers (and their in-demand products or services) is fierce. Platforms are being called to rise to a new level of seller experience.

This is why we’re launching Integrated Platforms, a new solution for marketplaces and payment facilitators to connect and control every payment experience on their platform. Built with the seller experience in mind, our solution empowers you to:

Convert more sellers. The ability to tailor onboarding flows to attract more sellers, removing friction while still capturing key information to compliantly activate sellers quickly.

Grow seller activity. The power to drive faster seller growth by automating funds management tasks and providing real-time visibility into every funding event.

Win seller loyalty. The payout capabilities that provide your sellers with quick, reliable access to cash flow.

Power in the platform economy has shifted to sellers

With hyper-targeted, verticalized platforms launching every month, we’re entering a new era of marketplace competition where sellers have more targeted choices than ever over where to grow their business. Visa Direct found that 95% of marketplace sellers list on more than one platform. 44% are evaluating which to join next. 56% would switch to those with faster payout mechanisms.

The point is that sellers are now in a better position to select the best marketplace payment option for their unique needs, simply because of marketplace diversification. It’s time for platform merchants to raise their expectations and locate business opportunities that drive deeper seller relationships and faster revenue growth.

In line with this theme of hyper-customization, here are some of the ways you can use our Integrated Platforms solution to curate end-to-end payment experiences on your platform.

Convert more sellers with frictionless onboarding

Onboarding is the first moment of truth between the seller and your platform.

Sellers want to join your platform, upload their products or services and start making money quickly. They don’t want to deal with lengthy forms, needless document requests and manual intervention. If they have to do so, they will likely abandon the process—which means lost revenue for your platform.

Yet, you must balance offering a frictionless experience that converts new sellers while still collecting vital information to meet complex global and local regulations such as Europe’s Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), including Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB).

To help you strike this balance and activate genuine sellers quickly, we’ve doubled down on our flexible payments infrastructure so that you can shape your onboarding funnel around your (and your sellers’) unique requirements.

Integrated Platforms enables you with:

1. Flexible onboarding methods. Choose from pre-built onboarding forms or get total control by building your own UI and onboarding sellers via our Accounts API. For example, we’ve seen some platforms shorten their time to market by using our dashboard onboarding forms, while others prefer to invest in building an onboarding experience that is fully integrated with the platform’s user experience.
2. Dynamic form fields. Capture the right information the first time around based on the seller’s location and category. For example, we only need to capture four data points to compliantly onboard an individual seller in the UK: first and last name, trading name, registered address, and date of birth.
3. Automated identity verification. From KYC checks to PEP and sanctions, we combine over 13 databases into a single workstream to make seller approval decisions quickly and precisely. For example, we’ve seen some sellers get approved to start accepting payments in under a minute.
4. Instant data validation. Instantly verify data to minimize input errors while the seller is still engaged. For example, serve a real-time error response if your company seller in France—whose representative must provide proof of identification—uploads an expired document that will delay due diligence approvals.
5. Retry scenarios. Not all verification failures mean rejecting the seller. To maximize conversion, you can retry soft fails by updating the required information and retriggering due diligence checks. Common reasons for failure are invalid personal or representative details, like email, first name, last name, and date of birth. Expired documents are another common reason.

Here’s a snapshot of these capabilities in action for a fictional home decor marketplace onboarding new sellers via API so they can keep their platform’s brand at the forefront of the experience.

Onboarding form optimization: streamlined form fields and instant data validation

Identity verification optimization: approving a seller scenario

Identity verification optimization: re-trying a seller scenario

Scale seller activity with seamless funds management

Sellers need to see a return on investment for choosing your platform. This often means focusing on the checkout experience, acceptance performance and global coverage, which results in maximizing sales on your platform.

But what’s less understood is the value sellers place on a partner that empowers them to manage cash flow. Managing cash flow is a constant challenge for most marketplace sellers, with as many as 80% citing that they urgently need access to cash to run their business. Anything a marketplace can do to support is welcomed by sellers. So, from visibility into balances to granular fee breakdowns, how does your platform equip them with the information they need to drive faster growth on your platform?

At Checkout.com, we believe in data-driven money movement, which is why we’ve added automated split payments, commissions and balance transfers to our Integrated Platforms solution. With this, you can control how money moves into seller accounts and between your platform account and seller accounts at scale. This granular data can set sellers up for success on your platform with greater visibility into every transaction, platform revenue, platform costs and growth opportunities, such as trends in buyer geographies and volumes.

Here’s a breakdown of our new funds management capabilities:

Split a payment: Automatically calculate and allocate the split between multiple sellers on a single payment. This can be conducted at the authorization, incremental authorization, capture or partial capture stage of a payment so you can move funds whenever you need.

Add a commission: Earn on every transaction by specifying your commission per seller in the payment. We provide a greater choice of commission types—fixed, variable, or compound—so you can deduct funds however you want, adapt to pricing sensitivities, reward loyal sellers, re-engage lost prospects and more.

Transfer balances: Make crediting for items such as loyalty bonuses and debiting your monthly fees from your seller accounts easier with the ability to transfer funds instantly via API or Dashboard. With Integrated Platforms, you'll always have a clear view of your platforms and sellers’ balances to efficiently manage your ongoing liquidity and readiness to pay out sellers on time.

Reconcile funding events: Get granular reconciliation of all payments, commissions, transfers, payouts, settlements, fees and everything in between via your Checkout.com Dashboard or downloadable reports.

Win seller loyalty with fast payouts

The final piece to consider is how money moves from your platform to your seller’s financial accounts. In today’s on-demand society, speed is the norm. The days of 3-5 working days to receive funds have passed and been replaced by real-time networks that give access to cash flow in minutes.

Platforms with solid reputations for providing quick, reliable access to cash flow are well positioned to win the 56% of online marketplace sellers who would switch platforms to get faster payouts. With seller-centric players already investing heavily in this area, such as Airbnb adding real-time card payouts to get hosts paid faster, failure to move fast could come at a high cost in lost seller revenue.

So, how can platforms increase retention with our Integrated Platforms solution?

Challenge: Sellers want more flexible access to their cash flow, without being restricted to rigid banking windows.

Solution: Integrated Platforms gives you a choice of payout schedule per seller, including on-demand, daily, weekly, or monthly options—and a customizable payout description that shows your brand on every statement, not ours

Challenge: Sellers want faster payouts to invest in their own growth, requiring difficult and time-consuming technical integrations on your side.

Solution: Integrated Platforms enables instant payouts to bank accounts by leveraging real-time payout rails (FPS in the UK, SEPA Instant in the EU)—and you get this ability with a single API for both payments and payouts at scale.

Challenge: Payouts are returned for avoidable reasons, causing sellers to miss or delay their payment obligations.

Solution: Integrated Platforms allows you to reduce input errors with instant validation of the seller’s bank account info, provide payout confirmation using real-time webhook notifications and detailed response codes and take action on granular reconciliation of payouts and fees.

Bank Payouts in real-time

Are you ready to grow critical seller mass faster?

The next wave of the platform economy is here, and sellers have awoken to their level of choice and power in driving platform growth. Any marketplace or payment facilitator who is not ready to recognize this change will risk losing their top sellers (and resulting demand) to competitors.  Now is the time to evaluate whether your solution empowers you to deliver the best payment experiences at every step of the seller journey, with the customization and flexibility needed to support you at scale.

Learn more about our Integrated Platforms solution to see how it helps to continuously elevate your seller experience for faster revenue growth, or talk to our sales team today.