Three pillars of e-commerce: fintech, ecosystems, and marketplaces

by Ivan Glazachev, CEO at YooMoney

The Russian e-commerce market can be certainly called ripe. Last year, many of us have contributed to its growth during the 2020 lockdown and self-isolation. The move of consumer demand online has set new large-scale trends in the e-commerce industry: the demand for ecosystems, the presence of infrastructure in fintech, and the development of marketplaces.

Bigger system = more opportunities

Right now, e-commerce is witnessing a particularly fierce battle for the customer. The key to winning it lies in the combination of several services into one large ecosystem, or superapp, under a single umbrella brand. This will attract the user to as many services as possible, which they’ll use to solve various everyday tasks.

These include shopping online for medicines, ordering grocery delivery, calling and paying for a taxi, subscribing to new films, and much more. Tasks like these have become especially relevant during self-isolation, and the possibility of solving them within one ecosystem can give a noticeable head start in the competitive race for the consumer.

Fintech as the foundation of business

People need convenient services for everyday life, and business needs the opportunity to make money on such platforms.

Therefore, financial solutions that help accepting payments from users are becoming an integral part of many online platforms.

For example, Apple has launched a bank card and app in the United States, Uber has launched a wallet for instant payments to drivers. Shopify receives 40% of its earnings from acquiring and issuing microloans to sellers, and MindBody (a platform for managing fitness centers) also receives more than 50% of its profits from acquiring. The situation is similar in Russia: foodtech teams issue corporate cards, retailers develop payment scenarios without a sales register or payment kiosk, and transport aggregators are interested in solutions for mass payouts.

Andreessen Horowitz estimates that 80% of tech companies will master fintech as a tool for retention and additional monetization within 5 years. An obvious trend in recent years, which was set by Apple Pay and NFS, is a fast and convenient payment process that doesn’t require directly using a card or entering a PIN code.

Flexible solutions and fast payments

YooMoney develops the concept of fintech as a service through B2B2B and B2B2C products. We use our strengths (fast onboarding, technical integration, high-quality payment experience) and diversify the classic business model through the development of separate services that work effectively both on their own and in conjunction with each other. For us, this work has three areas: flexible tools for seamless UX, low switching costs, and maximum coverage of fintech scenarios.

A few examples: YooMoney payment widget is a ready-made form for payment acceptance on the website. The widget provides options for accepting payments made via many popular payment methods, adapts to the screens of different devices, can be customized for any brand colors, and also remembers bank card data and supports autopayments. The widget can also be precisely customized for a specific audience with only the necessary payment methods left available. We’re constantly improving the widget and monitoring the results: for platforms that use it, payment time from the user’s side has decreased by an average of 36 seconds, with conversion increasing by 12% over last year.

Marketplaces and multiple carts

YooMoney also has a special solution created within the context of another industry trend: the development of marketplaces and aggregators. This solution provides the tools to automatically distribute money between various sellers whose goods and services have been paid for within a single order at the marketplace. It’s worth noting that the money doesn’t go through the current account of the marketplace, it’s sent directly from the buyer to the sellers.

Multiple cart feature is especially effective in such areas of business as low-cost services, highly regulated industries, international trading, and settlements with non-residents.

More minimal

Technological progress is sweeping the planet, and fintech is transforming it into business benefits and consumer advantage. Figuratively speaking, at first, transactions resembled clumsy behemoths, then they turned into spacecrafts with lots of options and nuances, and now they’re becoming super-efficient and minimalistic tools. The design principle ensures this super-efficiency, allowing only the most needed fintech products to enter the combination that truly satisfies the needs of the end-user.