NEW REPORT: How Open Platforms Open New Sales Doors For Merchants

With so many options at their disposal, customers increasingly expect eCommerce platforms to provide great user experiences. For the platforms, this means commitment to constant evolution.

The May PYMNTS Payments Powering Platforms Tracker , powered by WePay, features news and headlines on companies looking to bring payments-powered platforms to a wider audience than ever before — and those that are debuting new features or offerings to do so.

Around the Platform World

Millennials and modern consumers are using platform services for everything from streaming to ride sharing, and platform-based merchants are collecting more revenue than ever before. That’s good news for platform payment processors, who are working to get a slice of that quickly increasing payment processing pie.

And, in order to keep up with the competition, several processors and providers recently unveiled new services and features.

Dwolla and Plaid announced a new partnership designed to tokenize sensitive information to protect financial data transferred via the ACH network, which is currently used to move more than $70 billion a year.

Similarly, Square announced new additions to the platform’s engineering team, spending $3 million to hire the engineers behind the once-popular social networking site Yik Yak. The move, designed to boost the company’s user experience, is the latest in a recent line of acquisitions from the Jack Dorsey-founded company.

Staying Open to Help eCommerce Merchants Make It

With so many platform options, it’s harder than ever for merchants to get their message in front of potential customers.

In an interview for the May Tracker’s feature story, Leo Castro, VP of eCommerce platform BigCommerce, told PYMNTS that in order to help merchants break through the noise, he and his team have worked to keep the platform “agnostic,” with the ability to work with a range of payment types, integrations, tools and merchants.

“We partner with a wide variety of other folks in the payment space because we know that we aren’t necessarily the experts in payments, but we want to work with the folks that are,” he said. “We want to give our merchants and their customers choice over how they want to conduct transactions, no matter what that method is. For smaller merchants, we provide default payment processing options that we think are best for them, but we really want to be a Switzerland in the payment space and work with as many different providers as possible.”

To read the story, check out the Tracker.

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To download the May edition of the PYMNTS Payments Powering Platforms Tracker , powered by WePay, click the button below.

About the Tracker

The PYMNTS Payments Powering Platforms Tracker , powered by WePay, serves as a monthly framework for the space, providing coverage of the most recent news and trends along with a provider directory highlighting the key players contributing across the segments that comprise the payments-integrated platform ecosystem.