From postage to payments
Comandia is the driving force behind more than 9,000 Spanish e-commerce and digital service delivery outlets. It's an innovative service that's helping anyone with a commercial idea get it online as fast as possible; pick your template, upload your content and branding, and you're in business. Already, it's home to small companies selling everything from fabrics and fashion accessories to locally distilled gin, offering them a variety of hosting options and service plans from as little as €9.95 per month.
One of the reasons that Comandia has won respect among Spain's small business community is that it's part of Correos, Spain's national postal service - a business that's over 300 years old, with all the gravitas that implies. Like most such postal services around the world, Correos has long understood the importance of global scale - if you're going to deliver more than five billion pieces of mail every year, much of it to or from other countries, you need an infrastructure that ensures it can happen seamlessly and without interruption.
This is where Paysafe enters the picture. We connect every Comandia merchant to the whole Paysafe product portfolio via a single point of integration, without them ever needing to write a line of code themselves. The secret sauce here is Skrill Quick Checkout, which incorporates the Skrill and NETELLER digital wallets as well as the Rapid Transfer instant banking service and many other local deposit options. That means that any Comandia merchant can now accept payments through Paysafe's own wallets, debit / credit cards and bank transfers. And they can do so confidently, thanks to the inherent trust between Paysafe and one of Spain's most visible national brands.
These things matter to every business, not least boutique gin retailers and fabric merchants. As many as three-quarters of worldwide e-commerce sales are abandoned at the checkout stage, representing $4.6 trillion of lost sales; a fact affecting every e-commerce merchant, of every size. Offering deep, broad, easy-to-use payments options - particularly those optimised for mobile - is a critical factor in retaining sales at checkout.
It’s not just local sales that benefit from robust payments tools. Comandia’s e-commerce customers may be Spanish, but many of them are doing business internationally. That means that they need access to totally seamless international payment mechanisms that cover all the bases and can handle multiple currencies; not just the usual handful of methods. And however good their payment services, it’s likely that they’ll also need support in their own language at some point, either digitally or via voice. Our new partnership with Comandia ensures that all of their merchants get both; a flexible and comprehensive array of global payment options, allied with excellent multichannel service in fifteen languages.
Correos has three centuries of reputation to protect, for one thing, and need partners with a proven ability to keep transactions safe. That's why our relationship with Comandia is so significant. Paysafe really understands security at scale, both locally and globally; we deal with thousands of merchants around the world every day, all of whom benefit from our deep and broad experience of digital payments. For their part, Comandia needs partners who understand how to support business models based on very large numbers of events and transactions, preferably with the smallest number of possible interruptions to their operations. And it needs partners who are trusted global brands in their own right, capable of inspiring confidence in a market segment rightly concerned about fraud and security.
So Correos’ choice of Paysafe as its Comandia payments partner is more than simply validation of our own proposition. It’s a recognition of the fact that to achieve their full potential, all e-commerce outlets are highly dependent on robust, secure payments mechanisms that inspire customer confidence. As retail moves inexorably towards mobile e-commerce as the default option for the world’s consumers, that dependence will only grow. Whatever their business, we think the merchants that prosper in the e- and m-commerce revolutions will not just be the ones with the most relevant products and services; they’ll be the ones who enable the safest and easiest possible payment experiences too. We’re confident we’ll be right there with them.