VS Pay
Stripe powered payment option for the VS platform
I was the Technical lead behind the development of the VS Pay service offered by Visualsoft to its merchants.
Visualsoft had integrated with many different payment gateways for its platform over the years, but there was something missing, they never quite felt "embedded" into the platform.
Enter VS Pay, an integration with Stripe, deeply embedded into the platform to offer the smoothest flow of any payment gateway.
Seemless onboarding
One of the key project goals for VS Pay was to make it feel like it was built for the platform, rather than a fully separate system.
This is where the onboarding flow comes in key, unlike all other payment gateway integrations (where the merchant had to go to the provider, create an account, and provide us with the details, which a developer would then have to hook up), we wanted the merchant to be able to full self onboard from within their admin.
This allowed the merchant to be in full control of setting up the Stripe account, and activating it on the website when they where ready.
The admin screen took them to Stripe to create an account, and seamlessly sent them back to their admin, where everything was automatically configured, ready for them to activate.
Alternative payment options
One of the main reasons that Stripe was chosen to be the gateway that underpinned VS Pay was that it offered so many alternative payment methods out of the box.
As well taking card payment, it gives the merchant the ability to offer these payment options, without the merchant needing to set up any other payment gateway:
Apple/Google Pay
Klarna
Clearpay
Sofort
Giropay
Revolut pay
These all appear with the Stripe form, and for the most part are a simple one click enable from within their Stripe account.
Success for both sides
The key metric of any project is how well it performs, and VS Pay out performed anything we could have initially expected.
We had 2 Monetary metrics linked to this:
Provide our merchants with competative rates
Provide a passive income stream for Visualsoft
And we were able to hit both, due to the high number of potential merchants we could get onto VS Pay, we were able to negotiate good rates with Stripe, which in turn allowed us to provide appealing rates to our merchant, especially when factoring in the additional payment options the merchant would have access too.
At the time of writing this, we have onboarded over 400 merchants, which has resulted in some staggering figures in the 3+ years it has been running.
Over £400m in GMV has been taken by our merchants
Generating over £10m in fees
So this has been a win for both Visualsoft and its Merchants
Technical Details
VS Pay was built as an payment gateway API that the Visualsoft Platform could connect to and initialise a payment with Stripe, from that point all communication with Stripe is done via the API, and when required updates are send to the Visualsoft Platform.
The API was built in a way that it could support other payment gateways in the future, with VS pay being the first gateway available, with the intention that all gateways could be moved to the API, so that the platform only has to concern itself with a single way to trigger a payment gateway.
This would allow for a complex part of the platform to be extracted, simplifying the platform, and also allowing for the Stripe integration to be build in a more modern tech stack like Laravel.