Dutch fintech Fero has launched their personalisation e-commerce tool, Checkout Companion, for Shopify-based businesses in the UK.
The startup claims to be helping merchants catch some of the 70% of online shoppers who abandon their carts during checkout.
Fero co-founder and CCO, Chris Stein, spoke with Finextra about how they gather their data, and what payment service providers are missing with embedded personalisation.
The fintech claim they can provide online shops with 430 data points to understand and act on why shoppers abandon their purchases.
Stein said they are able to track all details from when a customer lands on a site. This includes data like how many searches they make, the affiliate marketing programme they came from, and also includes how many details they put in at checkout. The aim here is to provide these shoppers with something which might draw them back to making the purchase, rather than a blanket 10% off to shoppers who leave the site.
He said: “We try to cut to the chase of what would be a reason for someone to abandon, and if there's a high risk of abandonment, what is the behaviour that is driving it and how can we address it.”
Stein elaborated on how the data is used: “Maybe someone was concerned about the shipping methods being too expensive, or someone was concerned about the size, because you can see they have three of same item in that cart and they seemingly want to check out, but they’re uncertain about the sizing or the return policies. This is where you can have bespoke messaging or tailored messaging back to those individual visitors, alleviate the pain, and bring them back.”
Regarding the gap in the market they are filling, Stein said: “In the payment space, what you often see is that most of the payment service providers, the Stripes and the IBMs of the world, they only look at the authorisation rate and once someone already clicks by, they don’t care for what happens before.”
This is Fero’s first launch in the UK after raising $3m in seed funding last year. Having already been involved with over 100 million transactions, they claim to have proven their models for bigger merchants, and they are now proving this for smaller merchants.
Stein commented: “What we are doing right now is actually going specifically after smaller merchants, like up to 100 employees, that’s where we see a lot of traction. It’s also where we see people understand the problem but they didn’t have the resources or the time to really get their teeth into it.”
The startup use a revenue-sharing model where merchants are only charged a percentage of the additional revenue earned from their tool.