U.S – Today, the American company, Stripe Inc. which allows both private individuals and merchants to accept payments over the Internet, launched a new service called “Relay”. The new feature allows retailers to sell their products through a simple button that can be place within apps. Twitter and other shops are currently using the service.
How does Relay work?
The new Stripe’s Application Program Interface (API) works with these objects: Products, Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) and the orders. Regarding stores, they have the option to provide their products information through Stripe’s API, which is a set of tools for building software applications.
The API specifies how software components should interact, or if it is the case that they already posses e-commerce systems, they just have to link their products to the platform in order to get the button for their apps.
Relay, can be use to finally enable instant purchase in third-party mobile apps. So, as we expected, the 140 words application Twitter, is already using Relay to make possible that merchants sell their products within tweets.
Like this one from eyeglasses retailer @WarbyParker, if anyone is interested in having a new pair of sunglasses, they can actually buy it within Twitter app.
Grab a new fall read and Downing in English Oak—a go-to pair of sunglasses for any season. Buy now from this tweet! http://t.co/HcDMSVrzJD
— Warby Parker (@WarbyParker) September 14, 2015
“We have 50 million-plus users every month who are tweeting some signal of intent with the words ‘I want’ or ‘I need” said Nathan Hubbard, Twitter’s head of commerce, as Wired reports. For the moment, Twitter won’t receive any fee from the transactions.
Shops like Spring and Shopstyle to name a few, are also offering this recourse.
Stripes’ winning part
Relay wanted to make the buying-experience less tiresome, due to common pages had previously the option of purchasing online, but statistics show that something was definitely going wrong. Now, with Relay, people can directly buy products within the app without having to browse different pages.
Mobile devices represent 60 percent of browsing traffic for shopping sites, but only 15 percent end up with a successful purchase, according to Patrick Collison, co-founder of digital commerce startup Stripe. “The obviousness and significance of the problem has been on a lot of folks’ minds.” Then he explained that you have to navigate through many pages if you see something you like in Twitter from a store and if you want to buy it “It’s like an obstacle course before people can give you money,” Collison said, according to Wired.
Stripe will charge each user 30 cents additionally to the 2.9 percent of each purchasing that is made via Relay buy buttons. The company is hoping that in the future, people will want to buy items directly from their favorite apps instead of going to their websites. So far, the service only works with U.S dollars and the items must be shipped to a U.S address.
Source: Stripe Inc