EU wide buy now, pay later platform

codeborne web development finance banking agile

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E-commerce thrives on cross-border shopping, but financial processes and payment systems remain trapped.

Our customer Paywerk unlocks buy now, pay later options, so they can move between borders, just like e-commerce should be.

How did we want Paywerk to work?

To use the Paywerk service, merchants have to integrate with the system. But a merchant wants to sell goods, not to hassle with integrating, upgrading etc. Consequently, the message from our customer was clear - adding Paywerk to an e-shop needs to be simple, simple, simple.

So we got going, offering Javascript and web components to integrate. Sounds promising. But not enough. Could we do more?

The majority of e-shops who use open source e-commerce platforms in target markets (DACH countries first of all) are using Woocommerce, Opencart and Prestashop. What if we made a ready component for each of these?

Research

While discussing this idea with our customer, they asked, do we know companies that know how to integrate with these platforms? For instance payment gateways like Klarna, Paypal, and Maksekeskus, don’t they already have all sorts of ready-made plugins?

What did we discover?

Digging deeper into the topic we saw that almost every plugin is developed by a different partner. To save communication time, we took a closer look at these plugins ourselves.

We saw that the plugins contained lots of business logic and most are written in php. Too heavy and risky. We asked ourselves, can we make the plugins more lightweight and move the logic a level higher, to the Paywerk server?

Meaning when something is upgraded in the service, the automatic updates take place in all integrated e-shops. All with the main goal to remove the plugin update hell from merchants and letting them to focus on sales. The risk that any update breaks something is just too high in practice.

Japanese culture on the train — Various Paywerk financing options would be visible in any online store.

The solution

The first lightweight plugin for the ecommerce platform Woocommerce was delivered to the customer in 2 days. The next two in the following days. The customer joked that they would have needed more time to explain the development needs to a third party than it took for us to deliver the desired results.

We did not stop there. Being a true TDD company, we wrote automated tests to cover the entire flow for each ecommerce platform to work with Paywerk plugin. As a result, problems are discovered before customers use the service.

Why Paywerk?

We believe the result means a hassle-free journey for European e-shops adding Paywerk to their flow to boost sales. As well as increased security as the business logic is removed from the plugins and any future issues can be fixed in one place rather than in each plugin.