2Checkout Pushes for Global Scale with BigCommerce Pact

Many e-commerce companies are pressured to enable sales in multiple nations without the benefit of a local presence.

Most of these companies are small to medium sized businesses wish to expand their sales to more countries while limiting the number of vendors they must work with to reach these new audiences.

"The global e-commerce market is booming, especially in markets such as China, Brazil and Southeast Asia," said Kevin Gallagher, senior vice president of global business development for 2Checkout, which is announcing a partnership today with BigCommerce, an international e-commerce provider.

The partners will combine 2Checkout's ability to support payments in around 200 countries and 26 currencies with BigCommerce's network of 95,000 e-commerce clients in more than 100 countries.

"The partnership allows a single integration to begin selling instantly in a number of different countries," Gallagher said.

2Checkout offers an onboarding service, as well as hosted checkout forms and application programming interfaces (APIs) that are designed to allow merchants to accept payments in jurisdictions with different currencies, payment types and regulations.

The onboarding service is digital, eliminating the paper forms that are usually required for merchants to establish a business in a new country. Gallagher contends 2Checkout's onboarding process can take as little as a day to complete, compared to the usual one to two weeks.

BigCommerce brings big scale to 2Checkout's efforts, Gallagher said.

"They work with merchants that are similar in size and type to the merchants that we typically work with," Gallagher said. "It's a huge distribution channel."

PayPal and Square also recently inked deals with BigCommerce.

"It's great to find a commerce platform like BigCommerce because it could really help to scale a payments capability," said Thad Peterson, a senior analyst at Aite Group.

The challenge now for 2Checkout is to now make sure it is properly marketing its services to BigCommerce's audience, he adds. "It boils down to how well their capability is merchandized versus PayPal or other providers."

It is important for e-commerce companies to demonstrate their ability to accept international payments, Gallagher said. 2Checkout received a $60 million investment in 2014 to fuel its international strategy; it has also updated its technology.

2Checkout and other payment technology companies are chasing a global e-commerce market that's about $1.5 trillion in size and rapidly expanding.

Other payment companies, such as WePay, are also attracting investment for their international efforts.

"Online merchants are increasingly looking to the global marketplace for growth and because local payment preferences around the world are highly varied, the execution of payment transactions is currently one of the most complex things to complete when selling across borders," said Rick Oglesby, head of research and product consulting for Double Diamond Group. "Big Commerce and 2Checkout seem like a natural fit, along with [the separate] PayPal partnership, as they try to eliminate this complexity for merchants."