Farfetch: Optimising payments to power growth

Farfetch is an international omnichannel platform for the luxury fashion industry. It operates a digital marketplace where lovers of fashion anywhere in the world can shop for an unrivalled range of products from the world's best brands and boutiques.

A range of services offer shoppers everywhere a great experience: Localised websites are available in 12 local languages with multilingual customer support, plus a wide range of delivery options are available. This includes same-day delivery in 19 major global cities and F90 store to door in 90 minutes. In a flash, F90 promises to deliver your goods from store to door, ready to wear.

From our side, we're making it easy for Farfetch to create experiences that span physical and digital retail, processing their online and in-store payments with one system.

The partnership of Farfetch and Adyen began back in 2012 when we were both still relatively small companies. Since then, we've grown a bit.

We've worked together to power Farfetch's ecommerce payments in Europe, the US, and Latin America, as well as two Browns boutiques. We also power the application of its Store of the Future concept with retail partners in London and New York. Using our technology, Farfetch can provide payment experiences tailored to each market, with local payment methods like iDEAL in the Netherlands and Sofort in Germany.

"In Europe, payment preferences vary almost as much as language. Adyen has provided valuable guidance, helping us identify which methods to accept in each market. On top of that, most methods can be added without any additional contracts or integrations so catering to local shoppers is easier than ever." – Mark Hobbs, Senior Payments Manager, Farfetch

Cards are the primary payment method for online customers, especially in the US, and it's imperative these go through without unnecessary interruptions. Adyen is a global card acquirer, and unlike other payment providers that rely on a processor to connect to Visa and Mastercard, we have built our own connection. This gives Farfetch access to detailed insights into card payments – including, for example, the reason behind any declined transaction.

If you know why a card was declined, you can do something about it. Adyen's suite of data tools, RevenueAccelerate, works in the background of each payment making real-time adjustments to increase the chance of an approval. For example, it uses Intelligent Payment Routing, to route transactions via the network and connection that's most likely to generate an authorisation.

In Europe, for instance, Adyen was able to increase authorisation rates by optimising the Merchant Category Codes (MCC), and retrying a selection of failed transactions. Mark Hobbs added; "Adyen's RevenueAccelerate service and suite of data tools have helped us recover otherwise lost transactions - helping Farfetch provide a superior payment offering to our shoppers. As this was part of the core offering within Adyen’s acquiring solution, we were able to benefit from these key features with no additional cost, development or hassle.”

To find out more about RevenueAccelerate and how to increase authorisation rates, get in touch.