Yet that hasn’t meant that the payment systems themselves were central to the site. A lot of them felt like afterthoughts — a plug-in with a clashing design added to a blog site or an iframe with another company’s logo sitting uneasily in the middle of a shopping cart page.

Well, that’s just not good enough anymore. You only need to look at the most successful and fastest growing e-commerce platforms of the past few years to see it. Take Uber, which has created a marketplace uniting people who need rides with contractors who can provide them in real time, with zero friction around payments. Or look at Airbnb, which created a way to turn any dwelling into a money-making bed and breakfast, with payments that just work.

Uber and Airbnb wouldn’t be the same without a payment system that blends seamlessly into the overall customer experience. But meeting that challenge took more than just design work. It required building a payment system from the ground up. It meant brokering deals with banks, meeting stringent security and regulatory compliance standards, hiring experienced risk assessment professionals, building anti-fraud technology and so on. In other words, it meant a lot of time and money spent on things outside the core product: a platform that delights users by letting them do things that were impossible before yet seem indispensable now.

But, what if you didn’t have to do all that work in the name of user experience? What if you could have a payment offering that seamlessly integrated into the look and feel of your platform in weeks rather than months, without having to jump through regulatory hoops or worry about fraud risk? What if you could be in the payments business without actually having to become a payments company?

That’s a question we’ve been working hard to answer. We’re excited to introduce WePay Clear, the industry’s first seamless white label payment service that also protects platforms from 100 percent of fraud and regulatory concerns. WePay Clear is built to address the trend that platforms (like crowdfunding sites, marketplaces & small business tools) are increasingly building payments into their applications instead of partnering with 3rd party payment services.

WePay Clear allows platforms such as Freshbooks to enable their users to accept payments under their brand. WePay will manage risk and compliance from behind the scenes. WePay Clear provides all of the core payments processing features - including merchant onboarding, credit card processing and payment settlement. However, unlike other payment facilitators, WePay Clear is entirely hidden from the end user. Each platform can customize it fully to meet their needs, while knowing that WePay is working behind the scenes to make sure every transaction is safe, secure, and carries no risk of fraud or chargebacks.