Philippines gets new payment solution to help e-commerce

E-COMMERCE is booming in the Philippines but payment platforms are struggling to support citizens without access to banking services yet with a desire to participate in the country’s digital economy.

Payo, a new cash on delivery (COD) solution, is here to solve the problem.

On its website, the company defines itself as a COD gateway for e-commerce platforms providing a full suite of technological solutions that enable e-commerce providers to reduce cancellations, increase revenues, and gain a clear understanding of the entire process.

According to Upgrade, Ofri Kadosh, Co-founder and CEO of Payo, says that in the Philippines, annual e-commerce revenues reached US$1.5 billion in 2016, and is projected to hit US$5.5B in 2020.

Meanwhile, the domestic e-commerce industry is expected to process 200,000 transactions monthly by 2019.

However, making those e-commerce transactions seamless is a challenge as poor credit card and banking penetration make going cashless a dream for the nation.

Upgrade reported that 93 percent of online shoppers still pay in cash since only 8 percent of the population carries a credit card and 72 percent doesn’t have a bank account.

To meet projections and hit sales targets, businesses need to find a way to integrate cash on delivery into their online sales platform.

And while the solution is to use COD, the challenge – especially for smaller merchants – is that such a service isn’t offered by logistics providers.

In order to help such merchants, Payo has partnered with couriers such as LBC, 2Go, Black Arrow Express, Ninja Van, Honest Bee, Zoom, Lalamove, and Dalasia.

“We know the struggle of businesses operating in the e-commerce space and what they have to contend with particularly when it comes to integrating cash-on-delivery in their payment process,” said Kadosh.

“One of the main challenges are order cancellations, which happens to about 30 to 35 percent of their transactions. For merchants, this means an automatic loss in revenues”, he added.

To help with this, Payo’s interface integrates with the merchant’s online shopping cart and then uses data science to process every sale and analyze the client’s order history.

Payo’s system also helps prevent fraud by analyzing consumer data to build a credit history for COD consumers.

It identifies potentially problematic accounts to minimize the incidence of cancellations even before the parcel leaves the merchant’s warehouse.

While the items in the cart are in transit, Payo helps track orders and communicate with customers to provide updates on when to expect delivery.

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