Barcelona-based Venca is one of Spain’s leading ecommerce fashion companies. For over 30 years, it’s been one of Spanish’s best-loved family brands, providing a fast and convenient way to shop for the whole family and their homes. With more than 20 million site visitors annually, it’s seen acceptance rates soar more than 96% since switching payment acquiring to Checkout.com.
Venca offers more than 400,000 different items, from fashion and textiles to homeware and furniture, to shoppers in Spain and in Portugal. More than 80% of Venca’s business is now online, and it aims to continue to migrate customers from its catalogue to its digital platforms.
With such a demanding audience, the company has invested heavily in AI, Business Intelligence (BI) and cloud platforms to create highly personalized online shopping experiences that deliver the right products, recommendations and content, at exactly the right moment. It wanted to offer the most popular payment methods and a convenient, frictionless shopping experience.
"Innovation is at the core of our strategy and is crucial to maximize conversion and sales," explains Jordi Badia, Venca’s Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer. "It represents a huge investment, so we can’t afford to lose customers at the checkout—especially due to unnecessary payment friction or false declines."
Like many European retailers, Venca was feeling the impact of SCA and the urgent need to optimize its payments to support its rapid expansion.
"Across Europe, many well-established merchants like Venca, are having to work harder to plug leaky sales funnels caused by increased payments complexity," highlights Jonathan G. Rambal, Head and General Manager for Southern Europe and LATAM at Checkout.com. "Many feel their legacy platforms, local banks and payment service providers lack the skill set to address this and are failing to provide the support, acceptance rates, and service KPIs they need to maintain their growing operations. They are actively looking for alternative payment providers that can help them cope with change and drive up acceptance rates and with it more sales."
Checkout.com offered Venca a fully customizable, world-class payment solution, full data transparency and granularity combined with local expertise and support for acquiring services across Spain, Portugal and globally. At the same time, it was proven to elevate acceptance and conversion. With an eye to the future, it also offered Venca vital functionality to expand its regional services portfolio as its growth strategy evolved.
Integration of the new platform took less than two weeks, with full compliance and rollout achieved in less than three months. Checkout.com shared best practices through pre-integration sessions and examples, which helped Venca to keep implementation costs low. Following Checkout.com’s recommendations Venca chose to deliver a more customized user experience via Frames and API. Frames allow quick and easy payment page customization and handle payment data while ensuring PCI compliance through tokenization.
"Checkout.com’s technical implementation provided great documentation and excellent team support," according to Jordi. "The new platform went live before Black Friday 2022. Generating four times our normal daily sales volume, it’s our most important sales period of the year, so there was no room for error. With Checkout.com, the implementation was smooth, with no UX disruption. And we were able to increase payment acceptance—without asking customers to input extra information or take additional actions."
“When you’re handling 500,000 transactions, this levels of improvement in acceptance represents a huge uplift in potential revenue,” emphasizes Jordi. “Added to this is the value of the investment you’ve already made in getting those customers to the checkout - in terms of acquisition, marketing and targeting. By giving customers a positive experience, you can keep satisfaction ratios high and reviews good, improving return visits, referrals and loyalty.”
To help Venca improve its sales funnel, Checkout.com provided payment performance monitoring support and optimization of capture rates, helped it to explore the best 3DS strategy and recommended alternative payment methods to cover its geographies and customer needs. As Venca still provides catalogue and phone sales, they are evaluating the Checkout.com pay-by-link option.
“We were particularly impressed with Checkout.com’s dashboard. It gives us better levels of information and reconciliation than our previous provider. We can also define rules to retry failed payments that meet specific criteria without any customer intervention, to boost acceptance levels even further.”
The dashboard helps Venca monitor real-time sales performance while also identifying improvement strategies across the business. Allied with performance support and dedicated Customer Services Management, it compiles data and provides access to a wide array of response codes and dedicated follow-up that addresses any issues fast.
Unlike Venca’s legacy payment provider and platform, Checkout.com gives it a reliable base to evolve its payment strategy in line with changing needs - whether that’s expanding internationally, adding in B2C marketplaces or extending payment options to digital wallets.
"By raising acceptance rates, they can help merchants to plug leaky sales pipes and improve business performance," says Jordi. "The ability to drive revenue uplift from your existing user base lets you drive growth without being over-reliant on expensive customer acquisition. That’s great news for a retailer like Venca operating in Europe’s intensely competitive ecommerce market."
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