Many of you will recall that last April we tested credit cards on the marketplaces as part of our CEO Hack Week Challenge. The results of the test were positive for authors so I’m happy to announce that we’re starting to roll this out to all US buyers. If you’re located within the US you’ll see a credit card option alongside PayPal when you checkout, allowing you to complete your purchase with a Visa or Mastercard without leaving the marketplace.
Why US Buyers?
Our recent expansion to the US has opened up new payment method opportunities to Envato that we wanted to implement as soon as possible. US buyers make up a significant share of transactions on Envato Market making this the best opportunity for increasing sales to authors. Credit card conversion rates are also higher when the buyer and the processing company are both in the US. Now that we’ve successfully launched our US entity and confirmed everything is working we’re ready to roll out this new payment method.
When will other countries be able to use the credit card option?
Envato Inc has allowed us to roll out credit cards to US buyers faster but we’re committed to rolling out credit cards to all buyers globally through our Australian company. Differences in the ways Australian financial institutions operate require us to do some extra work to achieve this and we’ll have more details to share on this soon.
Are credit card details stored by Envato Market?
For security purposes your credit card details are never transmitted to or stored on Envato servers. When you checkout a secure connection is formed between your device and the payment processor to transmit and verify your card details.
Which credit cards do you accept?
Currently we accept Visa and Mastercard branded cards, which for many banks will include debit versions. If you’d like to pay with a American Express or Diners card or are having trouble with another card you can choose PayPal and complete a guest checkout.
Are you able to pop back in a few weeks and let us know if conversions from the checkout page have increased? Or how many people are using the new credit card feature?
Before you did this for global users - and disable it -
And now you made this only for us buyers.
and after some days are you enabling this for global users.
I am seriously wondering here; have the good people at Envato never heard of a company called Stripe? In case the answer is “no”, Stripe allows anyone to implement credit card payments onto their web site in just a few quick moments… And guess what? No need to open a new company in the US either
As I mentioned the previous offering was a trial and was only ever intended to run for a very short amount of time for us to gather data. This trial allowed us to look at the conversion benefits as well as the significant fraud risks posed to Envato and authors.
We’ve been working hard to negotiate the necessary arrangements for a marketplace the scale of Envato Market as well as introduce much better fraud detection and prevention. We’ve now achieved this with our US bank but need to go through the same process in Australia where banking systems operate quite differently.
Uhm wait… you are telling us that reason why you moved to US is to implement visa and master and because of that we are loosing money on taxes?
And you presume that sales will go up because of that on i don’t know what analysis… in trial mode did the sales go up, I did not notice anything special.
All of this just smells on envato throwing sand in to our eyes to cover I do not know what kind of tax manipulation. Guess Australia is more expensive than us.
I’m sure you can appreciate that creating a new company entity in another country is a large effort and more than just implementing credit card payments. However due to the way US banks operate it has allowed us to deliver this faster to US buyers which is a benefit to Envato and authors. When the community succeeds we succeed. In our A/B trial we saw an increase in sales with the credit card option available which is why we want to offer this as soon as possible.
We evaluated a lot of credit card processors before making our decision. The reality is that when you have multiple companies in different countries even if you go with one processor (such as stripe) there will be differences due to the banks in each country. In our case it made more sense for authors and was faster to start with the US. It is in everyone’s interest that we get this rolled out globally so we’re working hard to do so with the Australian banks.
The statistics you guys are making are well bad. You are watching the overall traffic increase. But by % who gets majority of it? You sacrificed so much time and authors money which we have to pay for Taxes and you are telling me that the reason for that is visa and master option? Do you really think, any one that has some years on envato and some stats on to work with, will believe you?
We did not notice any increase to be honestly we just notice decrease. All the latest implementation you guys are making did not make any significant growth progress. Any in any case you do not need to be a great analytic to notice that the growth stopped or well slowed down drastically for Envato also.
In my eyes 95% gain will go to Envato with some tax manipulation or some other way. To be honest I tough there will be much more behind this so it gets me thinking what could it be to make you go trough all this major processes to get to Us.
For example in our country maestro is the most used card. And all the local biggest shop have it I suppose some other payments methods are in US also. But to go trough all that for Visa and master… really?
Wee need a bit more reassurance to swallow additional taxation. We are your suppliers and you act like you do not care.
If Cocacola asked for additional stats from Walmart they would get it.
So concluding this Envato is the one who is gaining the most of this in my opinion we just well… do not know how.
And the transparency of envato is lately well bad considering as i mentioned we are the suppliers.
As I mentioned we also expect an increase in conversion from being able to offer US buyer to US company transactions. These are not stats we have made up but industry facts that decline rates are much lower from the banks in these circumstances. Compounding this with the increase in conversion we saw from our credit card test and our recent improvements to the first purchase experience we hope will benefit all authors.
We’ll be looking at more payment method improvements that can benefit the community from both our US and Australian company in future of course.
Fantastic! I can’t help but wonder how many people are turned off by simply not being able to punch in a quick and easy credit card. Excited to see if this increases sales.
