NetFlorist partners with Peach Payments to improve conversion rate

"A small difference in transaction success rate can mean tens of millions of rands in revenue. Peach Payments delivers more successful transactions than anyone else."

- Ryan Bacher, MD, NetFlorist

NetFlorist, founded in 1999, is South Africa’s leading floral and gifting site. After 20 years of innovation, they continue to reinvent the corporate and personalised gift industry, enabling clientele to send flowers, gifts, jewellery and perfume to family, friends and associates both locally and around the world. NetFlorist has 5 warehouses and 200 franchises and delivers same day, country-wide. They are recognized as one of SA’s leading ecommerce companies, and have won many awards over the last 10 years. 

Ryan Bacher completed a Bachelor of Arts and Law Degree at Wits in 1994. After working for Club Med in the Carribean, he returned to SA where he worked in the internet industry for 2 years and thereafter co-founded NetFlorist. As Managing Director, Ryan is responsible for all day-to-day operations and strategy of the company. He sits on the board of the South African chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organization.

What was the problem NetFlorist was looking to solve when you engaged with Peach Payments?

For us, payment is the final step of a process a customer goes through, and as such, we are only interested in one thing: the success rate of that process. We’re completely payment agnostic, and payment gateway agnostic. We don’t care whether our customers use a credit card, EFT, eBucks or anything else. What we care about is the success rate generated by the triangle of merchant bank, payment gateway and ourselves. Assuming there is money in the customers account, and everything checks out from their side, all we’re interested in is this question: What is the chance of that payment being successful? I wanted to improve the chances of more payments being successful on NetFlorist. 

What made you choose Peach Payments as an online payments partner?

I was doing some research on who had the best transaction success rates, and all the research I did pointed to Peach. In other words, whatever Peach was doing in their environment, whether it was their redundancy, their uptime, the speed with which they communicated with the banks or whatever it might be, they were doing that better than anyone else.

How did you validate the Peach Payments solution?

We signed up with Peach Payments and a new merchant bank, because Peach suggested that one of the banks that they worked with had a better success rate than any of the others. We integrated with Peach, and then we started testing. We had multiple providers at the same time, which made it very easy for us. Once we turned them all on, we just watched the success rate of the transactions from the final click. We ran it over a month, and we do thousands of transactions a day, so we had a lot of data. And Peach was better than anyone else. So that was that.  

"Peach is a company that wants to grow in the space, and I think they’ve got the product to do it."

What was integrating with Peach like, and how did you find our support?

The support was great. No integration is 100% smooth, but we know that, we’ve been around the block. We got to market pretty quickly, which was good. And the relationship with all the guys at Peach, from Rahul down, has been fantastic. 

What results did you see from your partnership with Peach Payments?

Your transaction success rate should be in the high 80% to low 90% range. It’s not going to get to 100% because people don’t have funds in their account, or they put in a wrong digit, these things happen. But I’m not overstating it when I say the difference in an 85% success rate and a 90% success rate could be tens of millions of rands a year. It really is that significant. In our testing, Peach delivered more successful transactions than anyone else.  

What surprised you most about Peach?

I think the tenacity of your sales team. Peach definitely wanted us as a customer, which is nice. So you guys were on my case all the time, which I don’t mind at all. You know, I’ve got a lot of things to do in a day, so I don’t mind someone checking whether I’ve filled in all the right forms!

How have you experienced the impact of mobile in the ecommerce space?

Mobile is super complicated, because it doesn’t convert as successfully as desktop. Unless you’re going to order something that you can’t order on your desktop, like an Uber, or unless you’re fifteen and a mobile native, most people right now are going to default to desktop. The reality is that the world has moved to mobile, but the buying experience isn’t as good. It’s not as good because it’s not as big, simple as that. 

The mobile journey is completely different to the desktop journey. That’s impacted us, and everyone else that’s running an ecommerce business, because we have to think about both, and we have to think about them separately. And also, no one running an ecommerce business is fifteen - they’re forty, and they didn’t grow up with a mobile device as their primary device. And so we have to reorientate our thinking, and that’s made the whole ecommerce business much more complex. What we’re thinking about now is how to use the things that mobile allows - location, contacts list, biometrics. These things are what will allow the customer a more frictionless shopping experience. 

Ecommerce is all about data - how do you leverage all the data available to you?

The truth is that in any business, but particularly this business, our gut feelings are irrelevant. I don’t know whether a new idea will work, and you don’t know whether a new idea will work. In order to know, we have to build whatever it is and then compare. We have to compare the conversion rate of this scenario versus that scenario and understand which  is better. That’s the hard truth - gut is irrelevant. My gut feelings are very often wrong. We launch it, we think it’s going to be one way, we look at the data, and we’re completely wrong. I’ve been humbled many times by the data!

At Peach Payments we pride ourselves on delivering a seamless checkout experience for your customers, enterprise-grade security for your stores, and personalised support to you. Everything we do is about helping you find success online.