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Adam Conner (00:09):

Today on the Future of Fandom, get a glimpse at how consumers around the world are shopping faster, and what that means for fans here in North America. My name’s Adam Conner, I’m your host, and in this episode, we one click check out this topic with QisstPay via their co-founder and CEO, Jordan Olivas. Jordan launched QisstPay in Pakistan and expanded through South Asia before his entry into the U.S. market. As it happens, fans and customers abroad are much more tech savvy in the way they shop, and Jordan joins a select few early players in bringing that acceleration to our markets. That means by extension, that the future is actually now. We talk about that and then peer further into what paying for stuff might look like down the road. Let’s load up a shopping list and predict the future with QisstPay and Jordan Olivas. Jordan, thanks so much for coming on. How are you?

Jordan Olivas (01:17):

Hey, I’m doing well. Thanks for having me. How’s it going?

Adam Conner (01:19):

It’s going well. This area of shopping, next gen shopping, can we call it, is interesting to me as I saw it only for the first time last year here in the U.S. and even then only as a startup, as just a new idea. People thought, I can just click once and that’s the whole check out process, literally nothing else? Because everybody’s used to a different experience here. With that in mind, can you help set up for me and the listeners where that landed for you in starting this venture?

Jordan Olivas (01:56):

Absolutely. Once again, thanks for having me. For those of you who are not familiar with me, my name is Jordan Olivas. I’m the co-founder and CEO of QisstPay. We are primarily known for our buy now, pay later solution in South Asia. However, we have now launched our one click checkout platform into the U.S. as well as South Asia. Essentially, the idea behind everything is that in the U.S. and as a consumer, as a retailer, you have these mass amount of payment options and buy now, pay later payment gateways, wallets, and everything else. What’s becoming increasingly difficult for both consumers and retailers is differentiating which one is actually the best fit for you. As a retailer, you come in, you may have five, six, seven different payment methods thinking, hey, if I offer every option, I’ll have the optimized conversion, but the reality is, it’s creating a huge burden for the consumers because those payment options may not be relevant to your type of consumers.

Jordan Olivas (02:55):

And on the consumer side, having to constantly register, sign up, having it, remembering another password for another website is becoming increasingly confusing, and this is where QisstPay is looking to solve this. We’ve entered the U.S. market. We are engaged with some amazing brands, but essentially our platform, our one click checkout platform, allows consumers to register their information with us, and then we allow them to essentially, check out with just a simple click of a button and maybe a two FA and they’re off to the races, while merchants can go off and utilize every payment option available in the marketplace and actually measure which one is the most effective for their brand.

Adam Conner (03:38):

Interesting. So for a me, let’s say going and buying a pair of shoes or something like that, I go on the website and instead of navigate to check out, okay, list your card, list your address, all that, you’re going to take care of that if I sign up with you, and then all I need to do is click, hopefully a button that’s on that website, and say one click checkout with Qisst and boom, it’s done. I get some confirmation page and nothing else, right?

Jordan Olivas (04:02):

Exactly. Now, in what we do for the retailers, for example, we also provide a lot of fraud solutions for our retailers. For example, if we think that you as a consumer, maybe your account may be compromised, maybe for whatever reason we detect some abnormal activity in your account, we can add in a two factor authentication code that will be sent to your phone, to your email, for you to log in and then that’s it. It’s beautiful because we utilize a light box, which in layman’s terms is essentially, an overlay where you’ll see, hey, sign up for, give us your email and you’ll get 20% off, kind of that same technology. What that means is that you’re not constantly being redirected to different pages, slowing down your shopping experience. It’s just instants and you are just off to the races using whatever payment method you’re familiar with.

Adam Conner (04:52):

Okay. With that said as a foundation, let’s talk for a second about why consumers have gotten to this point. What market indicators were there for you out there to well, indicate, that behavior was driving towards this less clunky one click thing.

Jordan Olivas (05:11):

When you look at the market and from a consumer view and really from a retailer view as well, is there are just more options available. Look, seven years ago, your options was basically card and PayPal. That was really about it. Even today, many retailers still don’t offer PayPal. When buy now, pay later kind of came through, you saw a lot of traditional players in the financing space also coming online, it became overwhelming which options they should choose. That’s a big problem, so analysis by paralysis, essentially, and if you offer too many options, you are actually hurting your checkout. We saw the likes of Klarna, Afterpay, Zip, Sezzle, and Affirm, and everyone else trying to come out with all these solutions, and you had some of the other players like SynchroniCity, Catapult, Progressive Leasing, and everyone else coming online, but there was a huge, huge problem, and we’ve seen this before in other industries, where an industry gets extremely hot, you have a lot of players, you see a bit of consolidation, and then the natural iteration of that is really around creating platforms for a no code solution.

Jordan Olivas (06:25):

To give a little bit of background, essentially what we do is we integrate one time with the retailer and then the retailer has a no code solution where they can drag and drop to AB test different payment providers and see whose most effective with their consumers, and then we give them analytics around that, even as something as overlooked as click through rates. So, hey, I see that this one provider is converting more frequently than some of the others, however, they have a much higher click through rate i.e. consumers are actually clicking on their payment option more frequently. Even though they may have a slightly lower approval rate, it actually may be a better option for your brand because for whatever reason, that one payment option is a better fit for your consumers. And then from the consumer perspective, it’s great that my favorite brand offers this one payment method, but I really wish they would have maybe something else, so understanding these consumer preferences, measuring those results, and then providing those insights back to the retailers is really important for creating a great consumer journey.

Adam Conner (07:28):

Jordan, can you give us an analogy for the listeners? Because some of them may not have seen this yet on their favorite retailer, a one click checkout and may even think, hey, this checkout process that I have right now isn’t that bad, but perhaps if given a parallel to something else where they thought, oh, you know what, that was clunky and old school and I like the new way better, what might you be able to highlight for us there to open our eyes?

Jordan Olivas (07:50):

I’d like to take a side step on this and ask the consumers and ask the retailers, think about, if you, as an example, you use Chrome on your desktop, you use safari on your phone. How many times have you maybe abandoned a checkout or decided not to log into your bank account because your password wasn’t working and you didn’t want to take the time to reset your password. Every time you add friction in, you are adding the ability for a consumer to leave that journey and just not shop with you and go shop somewhere else. What we do is, because we are putting all this information into one place for the consumer, for the brand, we allow them to check out using only their phone number, and when you look at buy now, pay later and you look at really just the consumer psychology, almost everyone can remember the phone number.

Adam Conner (08:38):

You would hope, yes.

Jordan Olivas (08:39):

So imagine being able to remember your password. It creates an amazing consumer journey. For the brands, some of the responses that we get, and look, we’re engaged with some amazing brands right now, and one of the first responses I usually get is, “Well, we have an amazing checkout. Our conversion is top of class.” And I said, “Okay, really? Well, what’s your average time to check out? What’s your checkout abandonment?” And they’ll say, “Well, my cart abandonment is…” “No, no, no, no. What is your checkout abandonment?” And I may have said earlier, it’s interesting that brands spend so much time for paid leads, creating great consumer journeys, having great customer service, fast delivery times, good product availability and a huge skew of variety, but the point of checkout, which is literally the end of the tunnel, the most important thing in the website, they’re not really thinking about. Up and until five, six years ago until buy now, pay later made a big push, no one even thought about payments.

“This is in the next iteration of the payments focus is, hey, not only can I make more credit availability for my consumers and offer them more ways to buy, but how do we make this faster? Because for every one second a consumer takes is, you’re knocking off several percentage points off your conversion rates and is it really worth it to say, hey, I don’t even want to look at a way to reduce my friction? It’s just not a good way to convert more consumers, and if you’re really focused on the consumer journey, you should be doing everything in your power to make an easy way to check out.”

— Jordan Olivas (09:41)

Adam Conner (10:13):

Totally. I agree. And people haven’t yet really seen this in the U.S. I’ve seen it with one or two other companies as I set up top, but where you all got your start, as you mentioned up top was in South Asia, and I know that, that whole region, when it comes to their shopping experience, their connected experience, is the true future, way more than you have here in the U.S. for whatever reason, and I’ve heard that from retail experts, people who are experts in literally touring retail stores and shopping follows. What about that region made it take off? Why are those consumers so much more futuristic than we slow backwards Americans? I’m kidding.

Jordan Olivas (10:55):

Look, it came down to… What we were experiencing in South Asia was that you have a lot of this leapfrog type of scenario, that would happen, and what we noticed is that the checkouts there were being even more ignored. There weren’t as many payment options available. So, what we said was, “How can we evolve from just being a payment button to providing an entirely encompassing solution to make our journey much better?” Because what we noticed was, once someone selected us as a payment method, our checkout conversion was significantly higher than any other payment method in the region, and that kind of put two and two together to say, “Look, we can take our same user journey and apply it across the entire checkout,” and when I presented this to a few retailers that I have relationships with, because I’ve been selling into the U.S. for years, was, “Wow, can you do this in the U.S.?”

Jordan Olivas (11:49):

And what I realized was, it was just a matter of a few additional integrations and some slight tweaks to get it to work in the U.S. and it came off to an amazing success in terms of building a huge pipeline and I think what it came down to was that because we were there and there weren’t as many payment options, it was very easy for us to see the clearing at the other end, because there was really not as much fragmentation, and when you look at the U.S., the value proposition was literally 10 times as strong because there are so many payment options. There are just kind of a, hey, let’s just add more payment buttons and let’s try to get an easy upsell at checkout. For us, it was a clear indication that this was a perfect fit for this market.

Adam Conner (12:34):

It’s uncommon and not impossible, but uncommon, that an organization grows like crazy somewhere outside North America and moves to it and becomes crazy big and popular, and the movement comes here second. Maybe that’s just an arrogant thought, but I’ve seen that, especially in FinTech, so that’s why I specifically asked the question and was like, “What about everywhere else is more futuristic than here?” When it comes to other behaviors, what other behaviors have you noticed in consumers that in areas like North America just aren’t yet caught up to what you’ve seen globally? I think that’s important perspective. Too often, we get myopic about the behaviors here, and especially when we talk about the Future of Fandom, got to drop that, we got to look elsewhere. What else have you seen that might peer into the crystal ball?

Jordan Olivas (13:25):

My investors say the same thing. South Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, all that whole area to U.S., it really hasn’t been done, specifically from that region. You see some stuff coming up from [inaudible 00:13:36] to the U.S., but it is an interesting story to tell. There’s two sides of this. One are the differences. Two is the commonalities. The first is the commonality, which is consumers always want an easier way to shop and they want more choices within a reason. Those consumer habits are the same across the globe, no matter where you’re at. In terms of differences, one of the things that I think puts a big resonance is the reliability of infrastructure. In the U.S., you can go in and plug into any SMS provider. There’s probably a dozen of them with great reliability, and so you typically don’t get a lot of complaints of, “Hey, I’m not receiving text messages. I can’t access my account,” but it still does account for a very large portion of that.

Jordan Olivas (14:21):

You see those problems exemplified in emerging markets, and so when we build our platform, it’s built to not only scale, but support regions that may not have that same type of infrastructure. So for our SMS providers, we have five SMS providers, and we have a smart routing switch that allows us to essentially ensure deliverability. A lot of companies in the U.S. don’t have that, and I think what you’ll find is that in emerging markets where they leapfrog is the idea that the smartphone, the phone number itself, is tied directly to things like the equivalent of a social security number in a lot of regions. You don’t really have that here in the U.S.

Jordan Olivas (15:01):

Yet, the phone number is, to be frank, probably the second most reliable way to identify an entity next to social security and EIN, which is an extremely powerful statement. Yet, when I was 12, 13 years old, I think when I got my first cell phone, I knew my phone number, but I don’t think I could recite my social security number. Understanding that, hey, what is it that’s top of mind for consumers in these emerging markets is typically applicable to the U.S., but we haven’t gotten there because we have some more legacy technology that needs to be further removed in order to be relevant.

Adam Conner (15:38):

Let me round out this with a big question that you’ve tackled in pieces here, and I appreciate it, but it’s the namesake of the show, and instead of talking about where we are yet to go, just to catch up to what is present globally, let’s talk about what can consumers expect about the shopping experience, and let’s go with North America, but maybe if you want to expand to the globe, fine, by 2030. Let’s go with that because one click checkout now seems obvious for anybody listening here. I’m guessing to you, it seems easier than the process you go through today, but we are just in the infancy of that, and my guess is that there are things way beyond our comprehension that will look at you cross eyed and think you’re nuts, but you’ve thought about by then. What can you do to help us predict?

Jordan Olivas (16:25):

Without going into the rabbit hole of blockchain, Web3, and everything else, that’s kind of a big buzzword at the moment, which I fully believe in. I think what we’re going to see is there are always two sides of the coin. From the retailer perspective, retailers will start to come around to realize, I can’t ignore this. I cannot do everything, and I think that’s something that SaaS companies have always been further ahead than a lot of other industries is that, they say, “Look, I’m going to do one or two things. That’s it and I’m just going to do them really, really well.” And I think we’re going to start to see a lot of retailers and E-commerce brands, which are essentially new age retail, if you think about it versus brick and mortar. These brands are going to start to realize, hey, I’m just really good at the consumer buying. I’m really good at, not logistics, but I’m good at finding the right skews, creating personalized shopping journeys for my consumers, but I’m maybe not the best at XYZ, and I need to find specialists in those fields, but B) I think on the consumer side, you are going to start to see more consolidation of information into single platforms, while still protecting consumer identity and protecting consumer data.

Adam Conner (18:30):

That personalization is something that I’m sure we will continue to see blossom in the coming years. For now, it’s wild to think that something as simple as one click to check out from your favorite place is revolutionary, but thanks to you, Jordan, that may be more prevalent going forward. I appreciate you peering into the future for us and for explaining a little bit about that phenomenon. Hopefully we can catch up to the rest of the world, but for now, keep doing what you’re doing and thanks so much for coming on.

Jordan Olivas (18:57):

Hey, thanks for having me. Hope you have a great rest of your week.

Adam Conner (19:02):

Thanks again to Jordan Olivas from QisstPay for joining us, and filling our cart with knowledge about checking out, and thanks to you, the listener of course, for exploring the Future of Fandom with us. I’d encourage you to stay connected, too. Here’s what you can do. Subscribe to our show, the Future of Fandom, wherever you listen to your podcasts, and you can also find all of our content at livelike.com. Across socials, also, LinkedIn @livelike and Twitter @livelikeinc. I look forward to predicting the future again with you real soon. Until then, I’m Adam Conner saying so long, and thanks for being a fan.