HipVan is a fast-growing ecommerce furniture retailer based in Singapore. It operates with a clear purpose: to make designer furniture and home furnishings more affordable because everyone deserves to live in an inspiring home.
To this end, it believes in less is more — cutting down on non-essentials, both in organizational processes and middlemen and passing the savings on to customers. It also relies on being technology-driven to build greater efficiencies organization-wide.
As HipVan scaled, it began to encounter challenges with its previous payments provider. These included spiraling payment processing fees, a lack of dedicated support and limited access to its payments data.
"We knew the limitations of our previous payments partner were holding back our business and impacting the experience we provided our customers," says Shobhit Datta, Co-founder of HipVan. "That's why we turned to Checkout.com. It provides us with the perfect combination of technological sophistication, pricing and service that's allowing us to accelerate the growth of our business."
HipVan has seen a 15% reduction in processing fees since onboarding with Checkout.com, savings it's passed onto its customers. Checkout.com has also enabled HipVan to achieve nearly 100% straight-through-payments-processing, streaming reconciliation and allowing resources to be routed to value-adding activities.
HipVan is also greatly benefiting from the granular payments data made available by the Checkout.com platform.
"The data provided by Checkout.com is allowing us to use payments as a strategic growth lever across our business," says Datta. "This includes instant insights into the cost of payments, customer payment trends and overall payment performance, including detailed response codes on failed payments."
Checkout.com is also working with HipVan to understand the data and optimize its payments performance. "We've improved our acceptance rate by about 5% because of the data-driven recommendations provided by Checkout.com," says Datta.
Checkout.com's local teams across Asia give HipVan access to round-the-clock expert support when they're needed.
"The ecommerce expertise of Checkout.com gives us a competitive edge," says Datta. "They're constantly educating us on the best practices around ecommerce payments and helping us apply these to our business."
And in the rare instances that HipVan encounters issues with its payments, Checkout.com is there to resolve the problems before they have a detrimental impact.
"When it comes to payment issues, the key is to prevent it from trickling down and affecting the customer experience," says Datta. "Checkout.com is exceptionally proactive in identifying and flagging any issues early on and providing clear recommendations on the best way to tackle them. For instance, they've recently supported us to deploy 3D Secure to better protect ourselves and our customers from fraud.
“Checkout.com has shown itself to be an integral, trusted partner for HipVan," says Datta. "I feel confident in leaving the efficiency and security of our payments function to the experts at Checkout.com, while we focus on things that bring greater value to our business and our customers.”
Although HipVan is primarily an ecommerce business, it has plans to begin opening physical stores across Singapore. However, HipVan isn't looking at its online and physical stores as separate entities. Instead, it sees them as two equal aspects of a unified customer experience it's planning to create. And digital payments — powered by Checkout.com — will be a key enabler of the experience.
"We're in the early stages of sketching out what this will look like and how we'll blend the offline and online experience," explains Datta. "The Checkout.com team has already brought several exciting ideas to the table that are helping shape our plans. We're really excited by the vision they have and the future potential of our partnership."
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