Customer Stories - Video Transcripts

BuilderTREND - A payments journey

We sell software to the constructionindustry, so most of our clients rangefrom residential contractors, home builders, remodelers, home improvement contractors, the guy that comes and fixes your fence, the guy put your roof on your house, that's our client base and it’s a huge market and it's a global market for us.

Be great at what you’re great at, because if you kind of get sidetracked by everything else you’re just going to be really average. So we know what we're great at, and so these other things like payments, and you know accounting software for example, we're trying to find the best and breed partners out there in the marketplace.

Our SaaS solution, you know there was money, but there wasn't real money being passed back and forth between either the consumer and the business, or the business-to-business so you could see the approvals through our system but there was real no transactions. So we found WePay a couple years ago and that's really how we started really providing platform for payments in our system so it's been a great partnership and I think something our customers absolutely love.

I think for us, you know partnerships are really unique and it's like a bit like a marriage in some ways, and so you want to be able to look across the table to your partner and know that, you gotta find out why they're successful and what's going to make them successful, and they need to know the same about your business. And so I think when WePay came to the door and we had our meeting with WePay, it felt good you know? I mean I think sometimes you make these decisions based on like how your gut instincts feel about these guys, and so it's been a great partnership and we've learned things from each other, we’ve made mistakes, but overall I mean it's been a good partnership, and we’re trying to achieve the same thing.

______________________________________________________ - A payments journey

It starts with me being elected as the founding PTA president of my kids elementary school and while I was in that role, we started looking around. We held a fundraising auction every year to raise money for the PTA and started looking around for software and I didn't really like the value proposition that was out there for the the big guys in the space. Our PTA booster clubs that are running a fundraising event once a year, these are not people who generally have had to go out and source merchant processing prior, but credit card payments are incredibly important to have at a fundraising auction. You really want the parents or the supporters of the organization to spend more than they have in their pockets that night so you need to be able to take credit card payments at the events, and you need to have a processor that will work with you give a decent rates etc, and my customers need somebody who is going to understand who they are and the fact they're not experienced at negotiating contracts with merchant processing banks.

We've had integrations with the number of different internet payment gateways and allowed our customers to choose who they wanted to work with, and often times they don't have an existing account and they would ask for a referral, and it's been a real roller coaster over the you know the nine years of our company, finding partners who I felt could take care of our customers, and many of the companies that we would refer them to would start out fine but then after a while, it would drop way. And the process of signing up for a merchant account is something that most of these people do not have experience with, and it can be incredibly complicated and so I you know we would have to hold their hand quite a bit in the early stages getting them set up with payment processing.

There were a couple of things about WePay that we thought would be extremely beneficial for us: One, the really easy fast signup process. Our customers can start processing cards within about 10 minutes if they choose to work with WePay, and that's incredibly valuable for us. My customers are special, they're a different breed, they're doing something a little out of the ordinary, and I want as much as possible to know that the people at my partner have a real understanding of that and a real respect for it.


Webconnex - A payments journey

Eric Knopf, Co-Founder, Webconnex: So at Webconnex we make software for people who are organizing events and raising money. So you can have your event registration powered by us, you can raise money for your church or charity. So anywhere you are raising money for a cause or taking money for an event.

What is unique about Webconnex?

John Russell, Co-Founder, Webconnex: I think what is a bit different about us is that we really focus on two things. One, we focus on our customers and give them the ability to control the entire experience so we really make it about their brand and what they want to do, not about us. And the second thing is we are really focused a lot on the end user. We want to have the person who is registering or buying tickets or donating, for them to have a simple, easy way to get that done.

So, we had a customer who reached out to us and they had and they were just getting crushed by their current provider. They were paying a ton, there was a lot of friction in the process, they couldn’t get the things done they needed. It was kind of operating on an older, clunky version, so they came over to us and we were able to help them get their fees down, they could put a lot more money into the event they were doing. We also added some really neat flexibility to their process. So in the end of the day it made a lot easier for them to get what they needed done and it was also a much better experience for their attendees.

How WePay helps

Eric Knopf: WePay has been fantastic for us. What WePay offers us is the ability for our customers to sign up for our software and then begin to take payments that same day. WePay is a fantastic product and it can do so many things. So when we looked through their documentation for how it would integrate with our software it was easy to work with and we built it natively into our software and their team was there to help us get it going.

Partnership pays off

John Russell: Our switch to WePay was a really, it was an instrumental move for us and it was a big shift for us. We were able to open up some new markets, we were accessible to new customers who probably wouldn’t have been customers in the past and it’s removed a lot of friction for us. Most of our customers really don’t care about what happens with the payment, they just want the payment in their account. And so what we are able to do is just bridge the gap quickly for that customer so they can onboard with us, get an event page set up, or a donation page, and then be able to be accepting payments within hours. And so, what we are able to do is keep a lot more customers and we are able to lower our abandon rate substantially by bringing on WePay as a partner.


Ecwid - A payments journey

Ecwid is an e-commerce platform for small businesses. It is designed for small businesses and it’s designed to make sure small businesses can sell online, offline, on their mobile devices and on social channels.

Adding payments to your platform 

So our journey into exploring payments started about three years ago. And what we started noticing was that we were seeing a lot of our customers signing up for our platform and they weren’t quite getting to the point of selling. We dug a little deeper and what we realized was becoming more and more challenging for them to accept payments easily. And the way small businesses look at it they go “I just want to accept credit cards and I want to do it without leaving my site. And I want to do it easily.”

We found that WePay actually had a) the toolset and the features to be able to make that happen and deliver on that and b) also had the right kind of people and partnership capabilities to really scale this and take this, make this available to merchants at the scale we want.

Partnering with WePay

The partnership element with WePay has been fantastic because we’ve had all the various cross-functional teams working together to launch the product and this includes both our business teams, our product teams as well as our customer service teams. And we’ve been able to achieve our goal of one-click payment enablement and also deliver the experience that we wanted.

The impact has been phenomenal. There’s no doubt about it. We released and enabled this feature to our customers a few months ago and we did not anticipate the kind of response that we have had. The payment volume has just been phenomenally high and unexpectedly high, so overall it has been extremely positive. And we believe the reason for that is because we have addressed this very specific pain point around one-click enablement.