Online payments gateway Braintree, founded in 2007, is about to hit a significant milestone: the company told BetaKit that it’s at $4 billion in processed ecommerce transactions per year. For reference, PayPal recorded a net total value of $118 billion in transaction in 2011 alone, but Braintree’s milestone is impressive nonetheless for a relatively young company in a very crowded field.
Braintree CEO Bill Ready says the company is making headway by providing a way to easily and securely increase sell-through rates. “Online merchants are always looking for ways to improve their conversion rate at checkout,” he said. “Industry benchmarks indicate that the average shopping cart conversion rate is less than 35%. The card-on-file feature dramatically improves the conversion rate at checkout. Braintree merchants have seen their recurring sales increase by over fifty percent when they implement the card-on-file features.”
Another way Braintree tries to differentiate itself is by being more flexible than the competition. “With Braintree’s Vault credit card storage, the merchant retains control of access to the masked credit card data and is able to port the data to a new provider if they ever decide to leave,” Ready pointed out. “The end user also has the ability to update their card information, such as entering new credit card numbers or expiration dates. With PayPal, the card details cannot be edited through the Magento interface.”
Braintree is focused on providing developers with solutions that take minutes to integrate while remaining payment card industry (PCI) compliant and working on mobile platforms as well as the desktop. That’s something Ready says is in contrast to larger companies in the space like Auhorize.net, which can often be complicated for developers to build into their existing software. Plug-and-play integration, especially when it comes to mobile, is increasingly something developers are looking for in order to free up their time working on other aspects of site and app design unique to their own creations.
In late March, Braintree announced a deal that would see it integrated into Magento, an ecommerce platform with 110,000 merchant customers including big-name brands like OfficeMax and The North Face. But what’s maybe most impressive is that Magento was acquired by eBay in 2011, meaning it shares the same parent company as Braintree rival PayPal. Braintree’s platform must then have considerable appeal, both for Magento and its customers.
