Julia: All right. Welcome to today's webinar. We are introducing PayPal's new guest checkout Fastlane by PayPal. And today we'll be sharing how Fastlane can help you lose conversion and improve the customer experience. So let's get right into it. So today I am joined by Jason Henretta, who is our senior manager for go-to-market of Fastlane. I am on PayPal's B2B marketing team, and we're so excited to have you joining us today. So just to quickly go through our agenda for today, we are going to go through first some customer preferences, understand who our consumers are, then we'll get into Fastlane by PayPal and talk through some of the customer and business benefits, Then we'll get into how you can drive conversion using Fastlane and how you can get started. And finally, we'll talk about some early results and how you can use Fastlane to get ready for the holidays. Great. So just to kick us off here, would love for you, Jason, to talk through some key shopper frustrations at checkout. We know they are ever evolving. And then how are these frustrations affecting merchants' conversion rates? And I'll hand it over to you.
Jason Henretta: That's a great question, Julia. So, you know, we did some research into some third-party studies and identified essentially three consumer trends impacting checkout conversion rates for merchants. And what's interesting is actually the first one that we found relates to store member account creation. And for many of the audience, you may know that, you know, merchants have aimed to create these like seamless checkout experience for customers. And historically, it's been centered around the creation of store accounts. And with these store accounts, right, it allows merchants to recognize returning customers, store important details about them, autofill their information into checkout and help them speed through. And some merchants actually have gone so far as even requiring account creation to eliminate these lengthy guest checkout flows altogether. But however, like one of the things that we found during this research is is that 82% of consumers abandon online purchases if the account registration process is too lengthy and cumbersome. And as you can imagine, this significantly can really impact a merchant's checkout conversion rate. So another thing that we also learned in these studies is that even when customers have an existing store member account, what we found is actually that 72% of them still chose to check out as a guest due to either convenience or speed. And, you know, as you can imagine, this kind of sounds counterintuitive, right? Like store member accounts are meant to be faster, but people are still choosing guest checkout for convenience or speed. And after I was kind of thinking about this a little more in my own experiences in shopping, kind of started making a little more sense to me because all these store member accounts have various different types of password requirements. Almost all of them require some type of a password. And, I mean, if you're like me, I have so many different passwords that I have to remember because not every website allows the same types of characters or has to be different lengths. And so I oftentimes forget what passwords I use where. And oftentimes I ended up getting myself locked out, you know, or having to force myself through a guest checkout experience. And that's extremely frustrating. So in reality, it really kind of makes sense that customers are choosing to use these guest checkout flows, even when they already have a store member account. And also the last thing that we also found in these studies is actually the fact that 66% of consumers expect these guest checkout flows to take less than four minutes. And really, this is extremely difficult for merchants to achieve, especially in these guest checkout flows, because these are where customers have to enter their full contact information, their email, their name, their shipping addresses, their billing addresses, their card information. And not only that, but they also have to kind of take out their wallet, right, to go get their card information. So it takes some time to do that. So, you know, after all of that, realistically, then they're required to then go through the checkout form and make sure that all this information is correct. And as you can imagine, that can take a lot longer than four minutes to fully go through that process. And hopefully throughout that time, there wasn't maybe a knock on the door or someone, kid bumped their head or something like that and take you away from the checkout experience only to come back to find that your session expired. And you've got to go through it all over again. And for those of you that might be like me, life comes at you fast. And candidly, that happens to me all the time. And oftentimes, I just tell myself, hey, I'm going to buy it somewhere else or I'm going to buy it another time. And chances are, I don't. you know, I just forget to do it. Things, other things come up. So, you know, that's, that's stuff that is really impacting merchants checkout experiences today, especially their conversion rates. Now, all that said, The reality here is that checkout processes are cumbersome, and we know that, especially these guest checkout flows. So there's a lot of opportunity in these guest checkout spaces to be able to accelerate customers, give them really great experiences, and help merchants be able to capitalize on these types of fast and autofill solutions so they can help these customers speed through checkout as fast as possible.
Julia: Great, those are super interesting stats and it's always so helpful to know our customers, especially around, even if they have a logged in experience, they're using guest checkout. So how can you, can you tell us a little bit more about what PayPal is doing to make this possible? We know that they want that fast and easy guest checkout. So let's hear a little bit from you about what PayPal is offering.
Jason Henretta: Yeah, I definitely love to talk about that. So I'm thrilled to be able to introduce Fastlane by PayPal, which essentially is a flexible, non-invasive shopper recognition and autofill solution that integrates directly into immersion's guest checkout experience, helping them boost conversion. And what I want to do here is actually show you in the audience a little bit, what does this look like in a checkout experience? So I'm going to play a video here and kind of talk through it while it plays. So what you'll see in this video is that someone decides they want to make a purchase for an item, and they add it to their cart. They decide they want to check out. Well, they enter their email address. And after entering that email, we recognize them based on that email address and send them a one-time passcode for them to enter in. And after they do that, we just simply autofill their information into the merchant's checkout, allowing that user to be able to review their information and check out in as little as a click. And the beautiful thing about this is that this lives in the merchant's checkout page. We're not hijacking their checkout. We're not making it our checkout. They keep it theirs. It's something that they can keep all the customizability and flexibility they need just using our solution to help accelerate that process. And the best even part about that is that this is all powered by the strength and scale of the PayPal network. And it really allows all any and any and all integrated merchants, the ability to tap into these millions of customers who actually trust our PayPal brand. And essentially, this just enables shoppers to be recognized anywhere they go that shopping at an integrated merchant, be able to access these saved credentials and complete a purchase as fast as possible. And in fact, one of the things that we actually found during our early programs is that we found that shoppers were completing guest checkout 32% faster when they use their fast lane profile to accelerate than people that didn't. And as you can imagine, faster shopping journeys makes it a heck of a lot easier and not just easier, but also more of a kind of a great experience for customers to go through checkout. And With that said, I kind of want to talk through a little bit of what this shopping experience looks like. And even for people in like, hey, let's say maybe I'm a person. I don't have a Fastlane profile yet. What does that process look like for me in order to create one? So then I can be a faster, I can check out faster in the future. So in this video that we'll look at here, it's actually going to show you a little bit if I'm not recognized What does that look like? And I'm going to play it here. Again, they'll start this flow very similar to the past. It should show up here in just a moment. There we go. It should start here in just a second. So in this experience, they're going to add an item to their cart. They're going to decide to check out. When they enter their email address, we won't recognize them. And again, like I said, we're non-invasive. So we get out of the way. We let that person go through the merchant's checkout as they normally would, entering their information and their card details. And then after they enter those card details, they'll see the simple toggle. in that experience that says, do you want to create a Fastlane profile for future use to check out really fast across any integrated merchant? Not just this one, but all of the others that are integrated with Fastlane. And by doing that, they then have these experiences where they don't have to have any passwords. They can simply go into a checkout, enter their email address, get a one-time passcode, and be able to enter it in and check out in as little as a click. And after successfully accessing that profile again, it just auto fills the information. So as you'll see here on the screen, their contact information in the email. It autofills their shipping address straight from their Fastlane profile. The beautiful thing about this, too, is you can save many different shipping addresses that are in your Fastlane profile. So if they decide, you know what, I want to ship it to something else, they can change that and select any other shipping address in their Fastlane profile. And then it also autofills that card details. We do the same for cards. So if you have maybe four or five different cards and you use different cards for different types of things, you can change and select whatever card information that you want to enter into this checkout. But we always autofill what they most recently used. And the best part about it is that we use encryption technologies to really allow these merchants to process these payments. So what does that mean, right? For consumers, it's keeping their card information safe. For merchants, it's simplifying their PCI compliance because we all know, you know, for those merchants that might be out there that might have been burdened by PCI compliance in the past, it is something that's cumbersome. And so we wanted to make sure that that's not just easy and secure for customers, but it also helps merchants to reduce that PCI compliance scope. And to top it all off, customers with Fastlane profiles that are stored in our network vault allow them to be able to shop back at that merchant again even faster. And we're finding that some of these merchants that have integrated, they have a lot of people that use guest checkout but frequently buy from them. And yeah, they might have to go through that first experience where they type it all out. But after they save that information, they're speeding through checkout each and every time. And not only can they do that across that merchant, but any other integrated merchant on our site, even if they've never shopped with that merchant ever before. So this really kind of shows the power of our two-sided network, really creating a fast, simple buying experience that customers love. And it helps every merchant along the way.
Julia: Wow. Super exciting. I love seeing those amazing customer experiences, whether you're a new shopper or you've used Fastlane in the past. So really excited to bring this to consumers. Let's get into how Fastlane is helping businesses. If you can talk through that a little bit, Jason, I think that'd be a great place to go.
Jason Henretta: Definitely. So as we talked a little earlier, typical guest checkout flows are riddled with friction, buyer fatigue, forces them to type in all their credentials, go step by step by step. And I'll use me as another example. In all of my checkout information, I have about 115 to 150 different characters that I have to type in to checkout in order to complete the payment, depending on if I'm shipping to the same address as my billing or maybe shipping somewhere else. And all this friction often leads to these low checkout conversion rates, which is really just for merchants means lost sales. Well, Fastlane really helps to remove this checkout fatigue, again, by providing these customers with a very simple and effective buying experience. This lowering of friction and creating happier customers essentially just means more sales for merchants. And in fact, what we've actually found is that when shoppers use their Fastlane profile, they're actually converting at 80%. And this is a lot higher than industry averages. We're finding some of the industry averages mostly for guest checkouts using cards to be around that 50%. So as you can imagine, you know, seeing customers be able to check out even up to as 50% better and converting 50% more often than people that don't get to accelerate is very impactful for merchants. And candidly, it's a huge advantage for them coming into these holiday seasons. Not only that, but Fastlane also has the reach and the scale of the PayPal network and really piggybacks off the trust of our PayPal brand. And that's why we call it Fastlane by PayPal. And even all of that kind of talked about there, a lot of people would think, you know, maybe something this great or something this powerful maybe non-intrusive you know it's got to be difficult to integrate right well we're super happy to tell that tell everybody that this integration is very simple and merchants can get started in a few simple steps perfect so i think that's a great transition what everyone's probably thinking right now is how can they get fast lane how can they get started and what are those next steps Yeah, I'd love to talk to those. So talking through some of these steps here. So Fastlane pairs directly with PayPal Complete Payments, Advanced Card Processing, and PayPal Braintree, which is two of our credit card processors that we offer today. And so any of these merchants that use these solutions can simply enable Fastlane solution within their PayPal or their Braintree account. And after enabling Fastlane, all they need to do is complete their integration. Now, there's two different types of ways that people can do integrations, right? If you're, let's say, on a supporting partner platform, and maybe you're using a platform like BigCommerce or maybe some of the others that are out there, super easy to be able to integrate this in as little as one step. And, you know, if they're on a custom cart, maybe they home grow or like custom they can complete a direct integration in as little as two to four weeks. So as you can imagine, creating such a simple enablement and integration process for our merchants was really important for us because like I kind of mentioned earlier about holiday season, we wanted to make sure that our merchants and partners had a very clear path to bring the solution to their customers in advance of this holiday shopping season. so they can capitalize on more sales, make faster experiences, and hopefully turn shoppers into lifelong customers for them, even after the holidays.
Julia: Perfect. Thank you. So I think now we can hear a little bit about how Fastlane is helping businesses get results. We have a few early adopters, a few early adopter case studies to share. So Let's get into that, Jason. What are some of our early adopters saying?
Jason Henretta: Yeah, so first and foremost, I'd like to introduce Black Forest Decor. We worked with Dustin Dupas, which is CFO and COO of Black Forest. And after working with him for many months, he actually shared some very great, really great statistics that he's seeing through his sites today. One of them is particularly, is that he saw their customers speeding through checkout up to like with an 86% completion rate. As I talked about earlier, like that is astonishing to see. I mean, for most merchants, if you have a checkout conversion rate north of 60 to 65%, you're in the top 10% of checkout conversion rates. And this was exciting to witness because they actually have four different websites that all saw this type of uplift in conversion rates. And not to mention that, other customers also we were seeing as we were kind of looking at the data is that even they have a lot of frequent buyers. So they had a shopper that, you know, check out as a guest, had to complete all those forms the first time, but the second they came back, they made it so much faster and easier. And we saw so many of their customers actually doing that each and every time they came back. And, you know, not just talking about Black Forest Decor, we also worked with the various other merchants that are out there. Now, one of the other merchants that we worked with, which is an early adopter, they're an enterprise client of ours, and they're seeing Fastlane customers convert at even 90%, which, if you think about it, I mean, 90% is something you typically don't see in a guest checkout experience, let alone people paying with credit or debit cards. And really, this helped them reach an overall guest checkout conversion rate of about 75%, which if you think about that earlier stat that I talked about, well within the top 10% of checkout conversion rates based on guests and using cards. And another thing that we saw with these customers and this enterprise client is that their customers were choosing to create Fastlane profiles about 50% of the time. And if you ask me, this is pretty astonishing to see because we hadn't done any consumer marketing whatsoever for Fastlane during this time. And so this really helps reinforce the power of the PayPal brand and how when we say Fastlane by PayPal, people recognize the PayPal brand, they can trust it right out of the gates and know that they can save their information with us fast and easy. And to summarize it kind of all off, you know, net-net is that FastLink can help merchants simplify their guest checkout experiences and take their business to the next level by driving an increase in conversion, a faster checkout experience, all while using PayPal's incredible reach. And not to mention with very simple activation.
Julia: Awesome. Thank you. Some really promising results. Very exciting to see. So I know that everyone is busy planning for the holiday season, the busiest time of year. And we know that during the holidays, you're seeing a lot of new customers to your site. Lots of guests. Guest checkout is going to be super important to get right during the holidays. So let's talk a little bit about how Fastlane can help there with those holiday strategies.
Jason Henretta: Sounds great. So that's a really great topic to bring up here. I've talked about the holiday season a few different times. So I'm happy to share that we've decided to not charge any additional fees for Fastlane throughout the calendar year of 2024. And this really helps provide a path for these US merchants to offer Fastlane for their customers during this holiday season. And essentially being able to give them a way to drive happier experiences and even more completed sales without having to spend even more money than they already pay today in credit card processing.
Julia: Perfect. Great. So just to summarize it all, Fastlane is all about less friction and more sales, and it's all coming just in time for the holidays. You can learn more at paypal.com slash guestcheckout. I'd like to thank Jason for taking us through all this today. And thanks to everyone who was able to join. You can find a recording at the page where you signed up. Thank you so much.
Jason Henretta: Thank you, Julia.
