ZALORA Improves Its PSP Offering With BridgerPay

Introduction

Zalora is the leading fashion and lifestyle e-retailer in Southeast Asia (SEA), with offices and operations that span across the whole region. Kannan Rajaratnam is the Regional Head of Payments for the group and was looking for a platform to optimize payment methods and providers across the company. SEA comprises countries that are very diverse, both culturally and economically. In such different regions, digital payment providers are also very diverse and localized. Consequently, customers’ preferences vary wildly when it comes to payments. Zalora’s main goal was to find a solution that would allow them to seamlessly organize their existing payment methods, onboard new ones, and all of this had to be done on a very tight deadline. BridgerPay was a pleasant surprise, and its team was able to deliver great results much faster than anticipated.

Challenge

Zalora’s operation demands interaction with several different and very localized payment providers. In SEA there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to online payments. As Regional Head of Payments, Kannan said he “had a long list of PSPs that were waiting to integrate with Zalora, and a lot of them had to be reprioritized, and then we eventually had to drop a couple of them”. The reason was that there were “limitations to the technologies Zalora used, so we started looking around for a provider to help us onboard all of these PSPs without compromising timeline and quality, and that’s when we found BridgerPay”.

To optimize their payments offer Zalora needed a platform that:

• Could integrate to any PSP on demand
• Improved the customer’s experience maintaining the company’s visual identity
• Could be deployed within tight deadlines and on short notice

Solution

Kannan said that “BridgerPay was able to deliver a lot of customization that Zalora asked for. This didn’t just keep us happy, it kept our partners and other payment channels happy as well”. Not only this but Zalora’s Regional Head of Payments was also impressed by the time it took to go live. He said: “The speed was astounding. This is something that I have not seen with anyone else. Beyond that, the openness to feedback and also to expand from their current product offering was great”. Furthermore, Kannan said: “Thanks to BridgerPay’s dynamic checkout we are able to integrate with multiple PSPs without changing the customer experience, and Zalora's look and feel are always maintained”.

Zalora doubled its offering of payment methods since adopting BridgerPay, and the new payment orchestration platform will allow them to increase it threefold by the end of the year.

In response to Zalora’s needs, Bridgerpay deployed its platform with excellent results by:

• Delivering quickly, not only meeting deadlines but slashing them
• Achieving results that no one else could in a fraction of the time
• Allowing Zalora’s customers to have a unified eCommerce UX for all PSPs, which they were not able to offer before.

Results

Every year, Zalora had to turn down multiple payment integration requests merely because the tech and resources needed to handle them were just too much. The rejection rate for these requests was 70-80%. Now Kannan thinks that: “With BridgerPay doing the heavy lifting on the PSPs integration side, we will be able to say ‘yes’ to a lot of PSP integration requests. This will help a lot because we will be able to use specific payment methods for every region. This is especially important in SEA, where markets are very diverse and localized”.

Zalora’s Head of Payments also said that “several integrations would have never been possible without BridgerPay. For example, we were able to onboard and close a deal with a Buy-Now-Pay-Later provider that we had been talking to for 3 or 4 years. Only BridgerPay was able to integrate with them in an exceptionally short time and with no issues”.

Zalora is now using BridgerPay to orchestrate payments all across South-East Asia, with these major benefits:

• More payment providers. Customers can now pay with their preferred method in every region
• Retailers are happier because the customer experience is flawless
• Helped Zalora close a deal with a Buy-Now-Pay-Later provider that had been dragging on for over three years, because no one could integrate with them