Pomelo is an e-commerce fast fashion brand best known for its women’s ready-to-wear clothing and on-trend accessories at affordable prices. Launched in 2013 in Thailand, Pomelo is an early adopter of Omise. The team implemented Omise’s payment services to offer their community of fashionistas the option to seamlessly and securely make online payments through the Pomelo website and mobile application.

Customer experience and satisfaction is a key pillar of Pomelo’s business strategy. Their focus revolves around an omnichannel sales strategy, agile warehouse system, easy try-on and return policies, and seamless online payments processes.

We recently sat down with Jim Boland, the Chief Finance Officer at Pomelo to talk about the role of payments in their sales funnel.

What does Pomelo look for in a payment gateway?

The philosophy of a payment gateway should be forward-thinking and tech-savvy. The technology should be adjustable according to our business needs. We look for a payment platform that allows us to provide the most frictionless experience for the customer, have a full-function system for the tech team to utilize, and efficient reporting features to manage transactions. In periods of extremely high traffic, the payment provider has to be able to handle payments without any technical difficulties. As the CFO, I'm always thinking about how to save and manage costs for the company. But it's definitely worth it to invest a little bit more if the technology is very slick, flexible, and customizable for a seamless customer experience.

"The online payment technology that Omise offers has enabled us to create a checkout page that is so smooth to the point that users don't really notice it.

What are some pain points you've encountered in the past?

In the past, I've gone through a lot of pain when it comes to payment providers and switching platforms. Working with a payment gateway that has limited technological features will limit the way you accept payments, and can hurt the business in the long run. It can be costly when the payment provider is unstable or often has technical issues and downtimes. For a business like Pomelo, there are certain times of the year where there are “peak sale periods”. “It's really important that there are no interruptions on the checkout page. It’s one of the most sensitive stages in the entire purchase journey because a lot of conversions fail at the payment. Take for example, if the payment gateway crashes during a peak sales period, besides a bad image for the brand, you unnecessarily lose revenue to drop-offs."

How's your experience working with Omise?

Pomelo has an engineering team in-house. The company on-boarded with Omise in 2016 by implementing our payment APIs. “Omise provides good tech-support for our engineering team along with clean documentation that is available online. When designing our customer purchasing journey, we take the entire sales funnel into account. Our engineering team is able to customize the entire payment process to retain our brand image which helps with our customer's shopping experience.”

Any e-commerce that is going to win has to look at every aspect of the customer shopping experience and how to make it as smooth as possible with the fewest clicks possible.