American Express Teams With Skipify on Frictionless Checkout

Frictionless commerce firm Skipify has launched a partnership with American Express to streamline checkouts.

The collaboration, announced in a Tuesday (Aug. 1) press release, lets American Express (Amex) customers link their cards with participating merchants, eliminating the need for shoppers to manually enter their payment and billing details, and thus boosting merchant approval and conversion rates.

According to a news release, the partnership is an offshoot of Skipify’s two-year-old relationship with Amex Ventures, the venture capital arm of American Express, which has invested in Skipify. The company is also backed by PayPal, PYMNTS reported last year.

“From day one, American Express has been an amazing partner,” Skipify founder and CEO Ryth Martin said in the announcement. “As we scale past millions of monthly checkouts on our platform, we are excited to layer in our Card Linking solution with American Express to the thousands of merchants that offer Skipify today.”

Based in San Mateo, Calif., Skipify works with financial institutions to pull and store consumers’ on-file payment and billing address information after securely authenticating the consumer at checkout.

“For merchants, this results in fewer abandoned carts and higher authorization rates, regardless of channel, platform, or processor,” the press release said.

As noted here in April, consumer-facing businesses have come to think of cart abandonment their most pressing threat. Research has found that 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, which means a significant share of consumers are placing items into baskets but not finishing their purchases.

“Never has it been easier for a consumer to find a similar product or experience at an alternative vendor, making the risk of an abandoned online purchase the highest it has ever been,” PYMNTS wrote. “Just as merchants are looking for ways to keep consumers engaged, marketplaces, or merchant aggregators, must do the same for their merchant customers.”

That threat has led to other partnerships along the lines of Skipify’s collaboration with Amex, such as Worldline’s team-up with BigCommerce in June.

“Every online shopper has a favorite way to pay, whether that’s using a local bank transfer method, a credit card, or a buy now, pay later option,” Björn Hoffmeyer, Worldline’s head of regional business, said at the time.

“So, when they aren’t offered a method that suits them, it’s no surprise that they often drop out of purchase.”

Those companies argue that better checkout flow and design can lead to a potential for a 35% increase in conversion rates, which translates to $260 billion worth of orders.