Before the pandemic, Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) wasn’t a big thing. During and after the pandemic, BNPL has exploded. From a retailer/merchant perspective, Zalora has seen a huge increase in BNPL demand year-on-year. During the pandemic, Zalora wanted to help their clients, said Kannan Rajaratnam. “We wanted to give users the ability to better manage their cash flow. The idea was not to encourage customers to split payments, but to make sure they were able to get the essentials upfront.” Watch the full webinar discussion here. 

Zalora decided to go for Shopback PayLater (formerly Hoolah) as its BNPL provider. With constraints on how many tech resources it could deploy for the integration, and without the firepower to do the heavy lifting and launch in just two weeks, the company partnered with BridgerPay, said Rajaratnam. Much of the complications were due to the fact that Zalora had very specific needs in terms of customisation and customer experience.

What was the need for the solution?

Shopback PayLater: The state-of-the-art Buy Now, Pay Later provider and market leader in Southeast Asia. Zalora needed a provider that could cover all its geographies, and Shopback fit the bill perfectly.

BridgerPay: The payment operations layer that seamlessly connects any payment provider (Shopback in this case) to the merchant’s checkout, according to its business logic, and without any effort from the merchant’s side.

How Was the Solution Deployed?

As with all its customers, BridgerPay did all the heavy lifting when it came down to the integration process, from the main requirements to the finest details. Rajaratnam said: “There was a lot of customisation, especially in how we handle customer data, that was specific to Zalora”.

From the Shopback side, Arvin Singh said it was essentially just API documentation that the company needed to share with the BridgerPay team. “So, a bit of guidance from our side, a bit of support throughout the process, and it was very fast to work together as a group to make sure that we could deliver.”

All in all, the whole go-to-market time was less than two weeks, and Zalora was able to launch its BNPL service in record time.

What Were the Results?

Buy Now, Pay Later revenue for Zalora was around 7 to 8 per cent at launch and has since grown to 13 to 15 per cent. With BridgerPay and Shopback, Zalora doubled its revenue from BNPL and was able to better manage its tech resources. According to Rajaratnam: “BridgerPay freed up a lot of our time and resources… we took our focus off the integration side of things, and focused on the business side.”

Improved customer experience and productivity

Zalora has received stellar feedback from customers, who report “it was super-helpful”. The experience is seamless, and the user is not able to see that it’s a three-layer integration (Zalora checkout > BridgerPay > ShopBack). For Zalora’s team, the backend view (in BridgerPay’s admin console) is intuitive, and the company can easily identify a transaction and make any changes needed.

Where does Zalora use BNPL?

At present, Zalora is able to offer BNPL In all the markets it operates in, also because Shopback supports the company in all. In some markets traction and velocity are slightly better, but overall all markets show a strong demand for BNPL, hence Zalora is seeing increased spending and cart size across the board.

What’s in store for the future?

From Zalora: Zalora is a customer-centric organisation that doubles down on making the payment flow seamless for the customer. In Rajaratnam’s words: “With BridgerPay we can tokenise the information we have about the customer and make their experience easier each time they return by making the checkout seamless.”

From Shopback: Shopback is working on a lot of fixes, adjustments, and tweaks to make the customer experience cleaner. Singh said that some of the things may not be obvious, “but they really help to shorten the customer experience from the start to the end of the journey”. “One of the most recent features that we deployed was to let the customer complete the transaction directly within the browser.”

All in all, Shopback will be focusing on ways to give users more flexibility without adding more steps to the checkout flow.

From BridgerPay: BridgerPay is able to eliminate any redundant clicks and take care of all the data that needs to be transferred so that the customer experience is as fluid and intuitive as possible. The company will keep on improving these features, and add new ones, to always keep up with and create the latest technology.

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