Creating Helcim's Online Checkout: A Product Manager's Tale

We sat down with Dagan Cardinal, Head of Product at Helcim, to answer some of the behind-the-scene questions about Helcim’s new Online Checkout Tool. We ask the questions you’re all wondering: Why did Helcim make an eCommerce platform with an app based checkout experience? Why aren’t we competing with big names like Shopify, and why did we revamp our past Online Store feature for this tool? Read on to find out.

The great eCommerce dillemma

It’s no secret that, during this day and age, businesses with an omnichannel presence have a distinct advantage over their cohorts.

As the market for online shopping continues to grow, we expect to see over 300 million shoppers by 2023.

The problem is, creating an entire website with checkout options can take considerable time, effort and a pretty penny. Many of the existing eCommerce integrations out there demand expensive fees or a high degree of technical expertise to build solutions into your website— not to mention the recurring cost of hosting a website.

Dagan Cardinal, Head of Product at Helcim, describes what he sees as the most prominent issues among small and medium-sized businesses trying to break into the online market.

“Many of these are single-person operations. They are not large corporations with a lot of resources,” he explains. “They need solutions that will be easy and quick for people to set up and use. If it’s not that, then people don’t have the time,” he adds.

Cue the Online Checkout.

So what is the Online Checkout, and what does it do?

The Online Checkout is an eCommerce tool on the Helcim Merchant Platform, available to all merchants with no monthly fee and no set up fees.

It enables merchants to sell online and accept payment as a functionality they can link from on their website or socials.

In essence, the idea behind it is for businesses looking to set up an online eCommerce presence to spend less time creating a website and to quickly sell their products online.

Who is the Online Checkout built for?

The Online Checkout is ideally made to help businesses with little to no eCommerce presence, who are small and growing and may already have a thriving storefront, website, and social media, but who face some of the common barriers to entry to eCommerce such as cost, time, effort, and resources.

Built with the consumer user experience in mind, Dagan explains, “all of us shop online all the time, especially since COVID.”

While the functionality for the business aspect was a large consideration, Dagan explains the merchant’s customer’s experience was also a crucial consideration.

“As a consumer, there are so many nitpicky things that I find when checking out through any eCommerce site myself, and being able to address those in our own product was really exciting.”

He explains that user empathy was crucial to building something that works well from a technical perspective, but also feels smooth and intuitive. This meant collaborating with different teams and testing the product from many different perspectives.

In regards to target audiences for this product, key industries the Online Checkout caters most to include:

Retailers

Merchants can easily take their brick and mortar business online and list their products or services

Restaurants

Foodservice owners can allow their customers to order online for pickup without having to pay high commission fees

Wholesalers

The Online Checkout allows customers to manage and pay bulk orders with a built-in Customer Portal integration

Businesses that already take omnichannel payments (In-person and Online sales)

Omni-channel merchants who use multiple different methods to accept payments

Dagan explains that the Online Checkout will be beneficial to anyone — from a business who is looking to start from scratch or looking to dabble in eCommerce to supplement their existing business.

“Those merchants need something quick and easy to set up, but it also needs to be a really smooth and clean experience for their customers,” states Dagan.

Why did we make an eCommerce platform, and where do we fit amongst competitors?

“The target market is interesting because some people might see it as competing with online store builders such as Shopify,” says Dagan. “But it’s not necessarily that.”

He divulges that what makes the Online Checkout different is that it isn’t trying to do everything competitors are doing.

Instead, The Online Checkout does one thing really well for a specific market: Getting businesses online fast and easy while providing a smooth, mobile first customer and merchant experience.

“Our previous online store product was really focused on being an equivalent to big competitors' eCommerce offerings. It was very customizable; you could have customizable pages, a blog— everything.

But what we found is that a lot of merchants just wanted something they could set up quickly and spend minimal time managing. Just a quick and easy solution where they set it up, add their products, and then it runs and does its own thing. “

He says this is often the same issue with many popular eCommerce platforms when it comes to attracting those customers who still haven’t taken their business online. It’s not for lack of features and robust capabilities, but rather it is too complicated, too costly, takes too much time, or is frankly, too much work.

“That is something we tend to see all over the industry, in terms of eCommerce, is that ultra customizable platform that you can do a million different things with, yet you’re left with this blank slate where you don’t even know where to start.”

When you look at a system like Square or Shopify, they are great products for those merchants that need that, explains Dagan. However, most small businesses don’t need that level or depth of detail and in most cases, don’t have time.

“So we are not intentionally trying to compete with those businesses,” Dagan reiterates. “What we are trying to do is find that niche where there are merchants who don’t need all that customizability but still need a really easy-to-use online checkout and that is where we are finding our wins.”

What are the main benefits of the Online Checkout?

Simple, Fast, and Free

“This isn’t designed to be your primary website. This isn’t designed to be a super customizable online store; it is designed to be easy and simple to get up and running and intuitive for your customers to use.

“The Online Checkout is a four to five-step setup, takes only a few minutes, and is completely free of charge.”

“You set it up, and it’s live and ready to go. You can link to that through your social media or through your website.”

Digital services and digital goods will be really happy to use this. While we don’t have a specific portal for people to upload and download, for people who just want to sell a simple service online and need to just accept payment through an online store this will be really easy for them to set up.

They don’t need to create a domain or pick themes, they can just click through a wizard, upload their logo and product, and there you go.

Designed with mobile in mind

More than that, it is made with your customers' shopping preferences in mind.

Businesses that haven’t yet adapted to online shopping demands may be left behind. 45% of consumers say that even an online presence is not enough and that they would use online ordering more often if they could do so via mobile.

“When we looked back at the data from our old online store, we found that most people checked out using a mobile device. So we built this entire product with mobile in mind,” explains Dagan.

“It's a mobile-first design. It feels really good on the phone, really snappy, really smooth.”

No more abandoned carts

One of the biggest metrics for an eCommerce platform is abandoned cart rates, explains Dagan.

"A very common problem is people browsing, seeing all the beautiful products, descriptions, and adding it to their cart," he says.

"Then what you might typically see is something getting in their way, there’s a bit of friction with the checkout. Then they stop, and it is an abandoned cart."

"We have seen a reduction in the number of abandoned carts when we moved from our old tool to our new one because we have drastically simplified the checkout process and made everything feel much smoother. This has been a huge win and we are really excited about that.

Full access to advanced features and low interchange processing rates

Businesses not only have access to this easy to set up tool, but they also have access to the rest of the Helcim platform. Meaning users can log in to the Helcim payments app to access their POS system and take advantage of the free built-in payment tools.

"If you have products that work on your POS and your Online Checkout, everything is all synched up between those things," explains Dagan.

"For example, with this tool you can count on better inventory synchronization. If you use invoicing, you can sell your products on the Online Checkout or through your invoicing system— one way you can use all of the Helcim tools in conjunction with each other

In addition, they are all free of charge, with no extra fees that you have to pay for these services and tools like you might with many other eCommerce platforms.

Certainly, one of the biggest draw-ins of the Helcim platform and the Online Checkout itself is having access to that full omnichannel experience and suite of free tools for free, but there is something else that is even more motivating, explains Dagan.

“Well and then the fact that all of it is available at a low processing fee as well. Significantly lower than a lot of our competitors in the eCommerce and in-person space is already going to be a huge win,” adds Dagan.

Since Helcim uses an Interchange Plus pricing model, many merchants are happy to make the switch or signup from the savings alone. They can simply head over to our pricing page and punch in their current rates into our rate calculator to predict their savings.

Since most providers use a flat rate pricing model, they charge you a flat transaction fee on every card and transaction type even if it costs them less to run the transaction. At Helcim, we only charge you the transaction cost, which is called the interchange rate or fee, plus a small margin on top. So on those lower-cost transactions, we don’t pad our margin and you pocket the savings.

Not Done Yet: Join us on our Product Improvement Journey!

“The product is released, it is out there, people are using it, it’s awesome, and we are really excited about it,” says Dagan.

“The team that has been working on it is incredible. They’ve done amazing work over the last few months.”

He explains that while he is thrilled for merchants to continue to adapt this new tool in their business operations, the team is still looking for feedback and continuing to improve it.

“If it doesn’t have a feature that you are looking for right now, you can let us know and we are going to look at implementing that as we go forward.”