Chrono24 is the world's leading online destination for luxury watches, with watches totaling a value of around €2 billion sold on its site in 2020. Based in Karlsruhe, Germany, its service is built on the foundations of security and customer satisfaction, providing parties on both sides of the transaction with the easiest and most secure way to buy or sell a luxury timepiece.
With watches on the Chrono24 marketplace costing anywhere from a few hundred euros to hundreds of thousands of euros, it must provide customers with a seamless and secure payments experience. And Chrono24 is harnessing Checkout.com's next-generation payments platform to meet this goal.
"Our customers spend months, if not years, searching for the perfect watch," explains Christoph Emminger, Head of Transaction Products at Chrono24. "When they find their dream watch on our site, we want them to experience all the positive emotions that come with making the purchase. So we can’t have a cumbersome payments process standing in their way."
"Since working with Checkout.com, we’ve seen the number of successfully authorized card transactions increase," says Emminger. "But, crucially, we’ve also seen a reduction in the number of retries a customer must make to complete their payment. These improvements mean they can check out faster and without the hassle of speaking with our customer service team or their bank, ensuring we deliver that seamless end-to-end experience."
Checkout.com’s unified payments solution, which provides merchants with unmatched granular payments data, is what’s allowing Chrono24 to drive these improvements. With Checkout.com, Chrono24 cannot only see how its payments are performing by market, issuer and payment method, but it’s also receiving raw response codes that show why some payments are failing.
"Checkout.com gives us access to more quality payments data than we’ve ever had before," says Emminger. "This data is allowing us to understand why issuers in different markets are rejecting payments. And our dedicated customer success team at Checkout.com supports us in interpreting that data and developing action points to drive improvements, such as optimizing the data we’re sending alongside each payment. And the simplicity and flexibility of the platform also make it easy for our team to implement these changes and track their impact."
Checkout.com’s ability to enable merchants to move at speed without making compromises set the foundations for the partnership with Chrono24. In the summer of 2020, Chrono24 needed to find a new payment provider to support its card volumes in nine currencies worldwide. And to be ready for the holiday period, it needed to be onboarded and processed in a short timeframe.
"We spoke to several payment providers in Europe and the United States and decided Checkout.com was the provider we trusted the most to get the job done in time," says Emminger. "We made the right decision. From a technical perspective, integrating with Checkout.com’s unified API was straightforward. While the support we had from everybody at Checkout.com, including the CEO, was exemplary at every step of the process.
"It took less than six weeks from signing the contract to being live processing payments. And we saw performance improvements from day one. It was exceptional work."
Despite needing to select a new payments partner quickly, Emminger and the team at Chrono24 know they made the right decision.
"Checkout.com is a perfect cultural fit for our business and a fantastic partner to work with," says Emminger. "It’s not a stuffy corporate entity that may have lots of experience but is slow to move and makes everything complicated. It’s also not a scrappy start-up that may offer excellent service but doesn’t have the experience of supporting a business like ours.
"Checkout.com sits at the intersection of the two, meaning we benefit from a best-in-class payments platform and the personalized support we need to optimize our performance and grow our business."
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