Stripe yesterday rolled out a set of new tools called Stripe Relay geared at helping retailers essentially put buy buttons in multiple platforms. This offers retailers a big opportunity to reduce the clunkiness of a buying experience that requires jumping through mobile websites, according to Stripe’s John Collison. We sat down with him to find out more about Relay and how the company built it.
Stripe Relay works by letting merchants put up products that they can then push to the company’s partners. One of the launch partners is Twitter, which allows merchants using Stripe to stick a buy button right on a tweet that lets consumers purchase the product within that tweet. The goal is to ensure that the purchase experience never leaves that native app.
The product was born from a desire to fix the mobile buying experience, which requires customers to jump through several mobile websites and input a lot of information in order to finally purchase something. That’s been a huge headache for consumers who have to enter credit card information, or sign up, or even reset a password — and it’s been a huge headache for retailers.