Heading back to school this fall? Well if you need a new backpack, pens & pencils, water bottle, dorm room poster or notebook Merchbar has you covered.
We’re sitting pretty and featured in the Apple App Store ready to give you the world’s largest selection of music merchandise and simple one tap purchasing with Apple Pay.
Whether you’re shopping for rock merch, pop merch or just for a specific item check out our Back To School merch selections for great items from your favorite artists.
For all the talk of “eating glass and staring into the abyss” starting a startup also comes with plenty of wonderful and unique experiences.
One of my favorites is the magic of turning a half-formed idea into a real product through the decidedly un-magical hours and days and weeks of pixel pushing and code writing.
Another is discovering you’re respected by those you respect.
We’re thrilled to have the Merchbar iPhone App be recognized again by Apple – this time on the homepage of the Appstore in the “Great Gifts for Graduates” category as well as in the “Entertaining Made Easy” feature in the Lifestyle section. Technically this makes something like eleven or twelve features for Merchbar, but we’re going to stop counting at ten.
Apple isn’t just a company that hackers look up to, they are a company that made many of us interested in hacking at all and over time they’ve given us more and more to hack with and on.
So first, thanks Apple.
But the product featured in the Apple store is a lot more than just a “product”. For a retailer the product is everything from the products you sell (which in our case is the artists we represent and the partners we work with), the investors that believed in this app before it existed and the team that makes all of the million things that need to happen… well, happen.
So instead of talking about this as a springboard, or listing the exciting things to come, we just wanted to take a moment to say Thank you.
So to everyone that has helped us make this happen – Thank You. We’ve had a tremendous amount of fun getting here and we’re very proud to work on it with you.
Ed
One month ago we released a new version of our iPhone Application “Merchbar – Merch & Vinyl” that (among other updates) included Apple Pay. After one month, we went back and looked at the results.
1. People Use Apple Pay
20% of all purchases made through the Merchbar app used Apple Pay.
(This is inclusive of all app users during the period – including those with devices that don’t support Apple Pay and those that haven’t upgraded their application to the newest version.)
2. Apple Pay saves significant information input time
This is the obvious dream of Apple Pay – Apple knows your info so you’ll never need to type it again: Apple Pay delivers.
Our legacy (and still pretty fast) Merchbar App checkout process requires 103 seconds for customers to type in their full credit card and shipping information, whereas Apple Pay require just 17 seconds to provide us with the same information. [1]
(Massive improvement!)
3. Apple Pay isn’t just faster than native – it is fastest way to input payment and shipping details we’ve seen on any device
When you factor in all steps of the process (input and review) Apple Pay not only blows our native flow out of the water, but our mobile web and even desktop web checkout.
Adding Shipping & Payment Details with Apple Pay is:
(Yet another reason mobile is becoming the first screen.)
4. Apple Pay increases conversions
Apple pay converts users 6.3% better than our traditional payment flow [2].
(But how?)
5. Apple Pay users spend significantly less time reviewing their carts
Apple Pay had big impact on a step of the process that isn’t directly related to Apple Pay – The final, important moment when users finally review their order and press submit. At this point all users (both Apple Pay and traditional payment flow) have provided us with their shipping and payment details and we present them with their total purchase price inclusive of shipping and handling charges. All they need to do is to review and confirm their orders…
Apple Pay users spent half as long reviewing their orders as the traditional payment flow.
(We believe this points to two unique benefits of Apple Pay)
6. Apple Pay makes it easier for customers to get final pricing
As a retailer we aren’t able to show a user actual shipping and tax costs prior to knowing their shipping information. While there are some other clever ways around this or previews we could incorporate, Apple Pay allows us to skip those hacks and not only show the user that information in just seconds with a couple taps, but also show comprehensive pricing to a user whose credit card is now ready to be charged.
(Big win for us.)
7. Apple Pay removes purchase friction – No need to triple check your CC & Shipping Address
Just like you don’t check your credit card number each time you swipe it through a terminal (you trust the system to transfer your details correctly) we believe users trust their Apple Pay details to be transferred correctly AND they trust their Apple Pay details to be correct.
Since they believe both to be correct, they only give their shipping and purchase details a cursory glance prior to confirming their orders.
This likely impacts conversion because it:
We’re very happy with our decision to incorporate Apple Pay into Merchbar, and can’t wait to see how these numbers evolve as adoption of Apple Pay grows.
We’re hiring engineers & designers! Interested? Send us a link to something you’ve built at jobs@merchbar.com.
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[1] Includes time users spent deciding to use Apple Pay, walking through submission and the system authenticating and transferring their information to us.
[2] For reasons we can’t get into, this number actually only includes numbers for users that have successfully submitted shipping and payment information. We suspect the data from the full funnel is higher.
Legendary Merch 
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