With Its Relay API, Stripe Enlists in Effort to Drive up Conversion Rates in M-Commerce

By John Stewart

With conversion rates dismally low in mobile commerce, technology players have been working to streamline transactions with tools that let shoppers buy with as few clicks as possible and while staying within an app. Late Monday, online processor Stripe Inc. joined that effort with Relay, an application programming interface that can power buy buttons within mobile apps and on social networks like Twitter.

With Relay, retailers send product data to Stripe via a dashboard, through the API itself, or by linking their e-commerce systems to the processor, according to a Stripe blog post about the new service.

This allows the merchant to display products and take transactions within the platform the consumer is using. Besides Twitter, other platforms that are using Relay include online fashion retailers ShopStyle and Spring. Online eyeglass seller Warby Parker is using Relay to sell within tweets.

Making commerce easier on smart phones is seen as crucial in overcoming consumer frustration with small screens, multiple data inputs, and slow response times. Stripe’s blog post cites data indicating that mobile devices account for just 15% of purchases, even though they control 60% of browsing traffic at merchant sites.

“Today, mobile e-commerce Web sites aren’t working,” says the post. “Ten-step shopping carts, mandatory account signup, slow page loads. When we get linked to a shopping cart on our phone, we usually just give up.”

Yet commerce on mobile phones is growing. Smart phones will account for $27.7 billion in retail mobile commerce this year, a 38% increase over 2014, according to eMarketer Inc., a New York City-based market-research firm. With the spread of buy buttons and other technology to let consumers finish transactions within the same app, and on the same device, that they started with, that number will grow another 32% in 2016 to reach $36.6 billion, the researcher projects.

And by the end of 2019, commerce performed on smart phones will be responsible for nearly $41 billion in annual retail sales, the firm predicts, good for a touch more than 40% of all retail mobile commerce.

With the Relay API, Stripe joins startups like XpressBuy Inc. and PredictSpring in supplying tools to streamline mobile transactions. XpressBuy last month announced four large e-commerce platforms had integrated its buy-button technology, and around the same time PredictSpring launched a platform that allows buyers to make purchases with a single click through Apple Pay.