Today’s shoppers are embracing e-commerce with wallets wide open: thanks to the <whispers> pandemic, the allure of online shopping – whether it’s to purchase or to browse and research before buying – is a powerful one. And businesses that don’t cater to their online customers stand to lose out – big time.
Yoco’s Online Payment Suite offers a selection of online payment solutions, with the right fit for your needs, no matter how you do business.
Online Payments Group Product Manager at Yoco, Julia Redelinghuys, takes us through Yoco’s online product range and how it benefits entrepreneurs.
- Tell us about yourself in terms of what you do at Yoco and how the work you do with online solutions helps your customers.
My passions lie in digital innovation, creative design, and financial inclusion. My role at Yoco combines these, and involves understanding our merchant’s needs, and then building online products that empower them- by creating meaningful connections to information, services, and opportunities to get paid.
Our vision is to be a multi-product business, and a large part of my role is moving Yoco to this point. I love how Yoco uses technology to truly walk the “open commerce” talk – by breaking down barriers and creating access so that more businesses can participate in the economy and thrive.
- What is Yoco’s Online payments solution all about and how does it work?
We are building a financial platform for modern commerce focussed on the self-employed who were previously dealing in cash. This started with our famous little blue card machines, and we’ve continued to grow our products in new areas such as online payments to meet our merchant’s needs.
During the pandemic, we recognised the great need for our merchants to accept payments remotely, as they weren’t able to make face-to-face payments during the lockdown.
In response to this, we swiftly accelerated the development of new online payment options, including Yoco Link, Yoco Invoices and Yoco Gateway.
Since then we’ve continued to expand our range, recently launching Invoices and a new Shopify payment plugin.
The direction we are moving into, this multi-product universe, is exciting as it’s about building products that answer small business owners’ needs, no matter the size or stage of their business.
- Please talk us through the use cases of each of your online products in terms of how they enable efficiencies for merchants.
Yoco Link: An online payment link that can be sent to customers via their channel of choice, including WhatsApp, SMS, email, invoices, or even social media. The customer clicks on the link, enters their card details and pays. It’s really that simple.
If you offer remote services, need to take a deposit before starting a job, sell products on social media or waste time scanning your bank account for manual EFT bank transfers, this is for you. With this simple product, anyone can accept online payments without even needing a website.
Yoco Invoices: Create and send your own custom, professional and tax compliant invoices for free. Each invoice includes a unique payment link, for convenient click-to-pay account settlement and instant recon from the Yoco App.
Yoco Gateway: We’ve made it simple for Yoco merchants to get paid online by accepting payments on their websites. With Yoco Gateway, we have integrated with all the major ecommerce web-builders, including WooCommerce, Wix, Shopstar, and Shopify.
- What benefits do businesses gain from using Yoco’s suite of online payment solutions?
Our products are easy to set up, easy to share and make it easy to track and reconcile payments in the Yoco business portal.
The world of online is often seen as daunting or out-of-reach, and it’s our team’s mission to demystify these solutions – and support all merchants right from when they start using online payments for the 1st time.
If you use a Yoco card machine, all transactions are combined and the more you transact, the less you pay.
It is free to sign up and start accepting payments online in less than five minutes.
Our free business tools (The Yoco App and Yoco Portal) provide sales reports, transaction details and day-to-day management of inventory and sales. All payments can be tracked and reconciled in one convenient place.
- Where do people go to get started on their e-commerce journey?
They can sign up here.