Brick-and-mortar retailers wouldn't dream of sending customers outside the confines of their stores to finalize a purchase. Yet online merchants do it all the time, ushering shoppers away from digital storefronts to third-party payment platforms like PayPal. It's counterintuitive--and can lead to lost revenue.
Roughly two-thirds of consumers abandon shopping carts before completing a web purchase, due mainly to the complexity and length of the checkout process. A new service, Ribbon, promises to eliminate this friction with a patent-pending, quick-and-simple system that enables merchants to take payments via links inserted into websites, e-mail, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.
"Why push buyers away from whatever platform they're already on? Why don't we keep them there?" asks Hany Rashwan, co-founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based company. "With Ribbon, the buyer never leaves."
Merchants log on to Ribbon and plug in product information, photos and videos; for each item, the service generates a short URL, which sellers can copy and paste anywhere they wish to offer merchandise. Each URL links to a one-page checkout option customized for that platform. For example, if a customer clicks on a product from a seller's Facebook page, the purchase is completed entirely within the News Feed, for a consistent, user-friendly customer experience.
Ribbon works with all major credit cards and processes purchases over a fully encrypted, SSL-secure payments system. All payments are deposited directly into the seller's bank or PayPal account. Ribbon takes 5 percent of the purchase price and a 30-cent transaction fee--high in the online payments game, but worth it for the convenience, the company claims.
Ribbon has thousands of vendors; roughly half market digital products like music. San Francisco rock trio Cloning Dolly turned to Ribbon to sell tickets to a recent concert and plans to offer T-shirts and song downloads in the future. "We posted the Ribbon link directly into our Facebook News Feed," says singer/guitarist Alejandro De Simone. "People told us buying tickets was easy and fast. The way it's presented is very intuitive."
This story appears in the April 2013 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
