Each year, TD Merchant Solutions surveys its business customers about top-of-mind challenges and priorities. One recurring theme, particularly among small businesses, is the complexity of launching online sales.
“It starts with our customers,” said Patricia Yun, Head of Digital Commerce at TD Merchant Solutions. “Every year we do research and when we talk to our customers, we hear, especially from small businesses, how complicated it can be to start selling online.”
“If you’re a small business and you’re trying to digitally transform, we want to make that easy.”
Patricia Yun, TD
This feedback prompted the bank to launch TD eCommerce Solutions in the fall of 2024.
Powered by BigCommerce, TD eCommerce Solutions, is available to new or existing TD Business Banking customers. It offers an easy to customize e-commerce platform with a full suite of capabilities including store design, order management, hosting, fraud prevention tools and card payment processing with TD.
Yun said that managing cash flow is also vitally important to small businesses, so the platform provides same-day deposits, which means customers have faster access to funds when they process credit and debit card payments.
E-commerce use surged during the pandemic, but demand hasn’t waned. According to recent data from Statistics Canada, online sales increased by seven percent in Canada in 2023, indicating a sustained shift toward digital platforms Yun said TD saw an opportunity to continue to help small businesses navigate their digital transformation and reduced some of the barriers to do so.
Small businesses play a vital role in the Canadian economy, she said, creating jobs and boosting innovation and supporting communities. To help, TD is committed to providing small business customers with the tools they need to succeed.
“Often, when you’re a small business, you have to make so many choices,” Yun said. “You have to pick between a website provider, who would host it, and a payment provider. If you don’t have development or tech resources, that can be really challenging.”
TD’s internal research showed that 64 percent of its businesses didn’t want a patchwork of tools. They wanted a single, streamlined solution. To build that, TD needed an e-commerce provider, so the bank worked with BigCommerce to begin developing the bundled solution in 2023.
According to Yun, one of the major challenges associated with the launch was having a platform that could offer hands-on support for businesses unfamiliar with e-commerce.
“Servicing was a top priority, and that was one of the primary reasons we chose to work with BigCommerce,” she added.
BigCommerce serves a wide range of brands, retailers, manufacturers and distributors of all sizes to build and grow their businesses online, which Yun said allows TD to provide access to a platform that can scale as businesses grow. She also pointed to BigCommerce’s plug-and-play design and library of ready-to-use templates, which allow users to quickly launch a professional online store without the need for heavy customization or development skills.
As a provider-agnostic platform, BigCommerce gives merchants the freedom to choose the tools that work best for them, without being locked into one system. “We really wanted to give businesses that flexibility of choice with respect to shipping providers, email providers, or CRM providers within the platform,” Yun added.
Yun said that a simple onboarding and billing experience was also important. “Instead of getting bills from multiple vendors and having to manage that, we’ve streamlined that to one setup in one bill,” Yun said.
Helping merchants protect their businesses from fraud was another priority in the launch of TD’s e-commerce platform. “According to a recent report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, 50 percent of Canadian small businesses have experienced either attempted or successful fraud in the past year,” Yun added. “About 81 percent of our customers tell us they want stronger fraud prevention tools.”
Yun said TD has enabled a number of fraud prevention tools including real-time fraud scoring and 3D Secure, which adds an extra layer of verification to online card transactions, to help merchants using its e-commerce platform protect their businesses from fraud.
“If you’re a small business and you’re trying to digitally transform, we want to make that easy,” she said. “We do no-to-low-code solutions so you don’t need a tech department or development knowledge.”
Whether that’s enough to carve out a foothold in a crowded e-commerce tech market remains to be seen, but for Yun, the focus is less on competing with tech giants, and more on removing the barriers for small businesses trying to go digital. TD’s entry brings something different to the table: a banking-first perspective on the challenges that entrepreneurs face online.
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For more information on TD eCommerce Solutions, please visit our website.
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Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Headshot of Patricia Yun provided by TD.