Though e-commerce has been around for over a decade in Europe, growth is hitting double digits every year and doesn’t seem to be anywhere near leveling off. Learn the key to secure your share of the boom with the payment solution provider whose growth has exceeded the European market 8 years in a row.
If you were to ask European online shoppers what their preferred payment method is, they would, to the largest extent, say that invoice after delivery is how they would like to pay for ordered goods. In Germany, Europe’s largest e- commerce market, which generated 27 billion Euros in 2012 (+28%!), as many as six out of ten shoppers would choose this payment method above all others.
Why? No matter how accustomed consumers are to the Internet, paying for something, before actually touching and feeling it, remains a major hurdle. With invoice after delivery however, consumers get the goods first, check them and pay only after. As you can imagine, this possibility becomes of particular importance for consumers new to an e-store – even more so when shopping from a foreign one.
Until recently, merchants hesitated to offer invoice because of the potential credit and fraud losses it entails – especially when selling to foreign customers. Now companies like Klarna, Europe’s leading provider of invoice based payment solutions (and pre-installed in 3dcart!) handle this for you, making it completely risk free. This means your overseas expansion becomes safer and simpler than ever. You can take a larger chunk of the booming European market (20% growth from 2011 to 2012) at no risk, simply by offering the preferred payment method.
Klarna was founded in 2005 and is backed by investment firms DST Global (Groupon, Facebook, Zynga) and General Atlantic (Facebook), as well as venture capital firms Sequoia Capital (Apple, Yahoo! and Google) and Atomico (lead by Skype founder Niklas Zennström). After outperforming the European e- commerce market seven years in a row, Klarna grew by another 38% in 2012 while passing its 50 million-transaction mark during Christmas sales (transactions that you could be claiming a share of).