BayerAG is one of the world's leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, with over 100,000 employees working for 354 consolidated companies in 83 countries.
Delivering innovative and sustainable solutions is at the center of Bayer's mission. A mission that focuses the Bayer team on challenging the status quo and creating more value and opportunities for its customers and humanity.
There are 500 million smallholder farmers globally whose output accounts for one-third of the world's food supply. However, life as a smallholder farmer is often difficult, with margin pressures, limited access to global markets and tightening regulation being just a few challenges farmers face.
As a leading provider of seeds and fertilizers to farmers globally, Bayer is acutely aware of these challenges and has committed to improving access to agronomic knowledge, products and services.
To deliver on its commitment, Bayer is giving smallholder farmers the ability to purchase seeds and fertilizer from a new ecommerce store. This allows those farmers to purchase supplies without paying a premium using buying agents and distributors designed primarily to serve large farming operations.
Bayer is piloting its new ecommerce store in Poland—the EU's leading grower of apples and second-leading grower of potatoes—before extending to other markets.
Selling seeds and fertilizer directly through an ecommerce channel isn't just a novel idea for Bayer; it's a novel idea for the industry. With no established practices to lean upon or legacy technology holding them back, Bayer had the freedom to choose modern, best-in-class partners to support them in transforming the industry.
After a competitive tender process, Bayer selected Checkout.com as its digital payments partner.
"Payments are one of the most critical and complex aspects of the ecommerce value chain," says Head of Digital Commerce, EMEA at BayerAG. "Checkout.com stood out from the crowd as a payments partner with the technology, knowledge and innovative mindset to help us navigate that complexity and deliver positive outcomes for our business and our customers."
Helping navigate this complexity starts with shaping a solution that meets Bayer's needs. This meant seamlessly integrating the Checkout.com payment gateway into Bayer's Magento instance. It also meant ensuring the appropriate payment methods were enabled, which in Poland is Przelewy24—a widely used real-time bank transfer solution.
The shift to ecommerce is a long-term strategy for Bayer, and it has all eyes on expanding its offering beyond Poland. And in Checkout.com, Bayer believes it has the right payments partner to achieve those goals. "Checkout.com's unified platform, domestic licenses, range of processing and settlement currencies, APM portfolio, and global team give us confidence that our payments can scale seamlessly with our business," adds Bayer.
The Checkout.com team also ran a series of workshops sharing best practices for processing payments online. Topics addressed Bayer's immediate needs around the cost and complexities of accepting payments and how to ensure it minimized friction at the checkout for farmers using the service for the first time. The team also covered areas such as multi-currency settlement and cross-border processing to ready Bayer to expand its ecommerce offering.
"The insights provided were invaluable as we built our pilot offering," says Bayer. "And the continued support from the Checkout.com team means we gain more expertise daily that we can apply to our ecommerce operations as we scale."
As the digital economy expands, more companies in more industries are unlocking its disruptive force to find innovative ways to deliver value to their customers. The fact you can now buy premium agricultural products from Bayer as easily as you can a jumper from SHEIN showcases that point.
With our enterprise payment processing platform, you can accept more currencies and payment methods through a singular API integration. Get in touch to learn more.
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