Online payments provider WePay this week announced better prices and enhancements to its API, two moves that should help the Palo Alto-based startup inch closer toward its larger ambition: knocking out its 800-pound gorilla competitor, PayPal.
WePay, which has offered its payments API for more than a year to small businesses and individuals, has dropped its transaction fee to 2.9% + $0.30 from 3.5% — competitive with PayPal. WePay also now allows its customers to fully white-label the checkout experience for their end users through its new tokenization API.
Even though the tokenization API is more geared at “sophisticated clients who want to control the checkout,” COO Rich Aberman tells Bank Innovation, the end user will ultimately remain the same for WePay. Why? Its new tech-savvier customers’ customers will largely remain non-technical, which is the market WePay has always targeted, Aberman says.
Though WePay wouldn’t disclose its total user base other than to say it is in the millions, more than 1,000 apps have made use of its API.
Beyond the news made public this week, Aberman also hinted at WePay’s near-term roadmap, which includes launching a mobile app for iOS in “the next couple of months.” Though details were scarce, Aberman said the mobile app could take a cue from PayPal’s recent move of integrating with Card.io’s image capture credit card installation feature to simplify the user experience, or WePay will find another way to make mobile checkout more intelligent, or deploy something else altogether.
“We aren’t ready to make our exact strategy known,” he says. “We’re exploring all options.”
Beyond its plans to roll out a mobile app, Aberman tells us WePay is working on allowing its users to accept payments on their websites as simply as if “embedding a YouTube video.” Currently, he says WePay is testing ways to achieve that goal.
Though Aberman concedes PayPal’s strength in alternative to date, he says the P2P ringleader has more than one Achilles’ heels that startups like WePay and Stripe can attack.
“The process of getting started with PayPal is abysmal,” he tells Bank Innovation, attributing the user experience difficulty to the player’s legacy technology and issues with customer service, among other reasons.
But ultimately, the biggest challenge afflicting WePay is an issue that afflicts most fin tech companies: consumers don’t give a damn about payments.
“Payments for most people aren’t a second thought,” he says.
But if the service is better and more valuable, people might just care enough to switch.
“When people see and hear about new options, they are pretty willing to jump ship,” Aberman says.