Starcart + Enfuce

Online shoppers have to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort searching for products, comparing prices, and making payments. Even then, they're liable to miss smaller retailers who might have better products and prices.

E-commerce expert Pasi Ilola and technical guru Lauri Piispanen saw an opportunity to transform the experience. Using bot automation, their platform scours the market for the best deals and fastest shipping times. Then it does the actual shopping for the consumer—making multiple purchases from multiple stores in seconds, with the consumer making just one payment. It's something that's never been done before, let alone at scale.

"Starcart wants to reduce friction in the online shopping experience. We don’t want people to waste their time opening endless browser tabs and spending hours looking for things that they need," says Pasi Ilola, Founder and CEO at Starcart.

The ability to make real-time payments to different merchants in a single customer transactionwas essential. Without it, Starcart would simply be another price comparison service. But one shopping cart could easily contain products from five different sellers—all having to be paid simultaneously. Furthermore, this functionality would have to be scaled up. The payments technology required would be significant. Navigating the intricacies of PSD2 would also present substantial challenges.

To find what it needed, Starcart leveraged Enfuce's turnkey Card as a Service (CaaS) platform, which enables companies to launch payment card programmes and embedded payments solutions. Enfuce was founded in 2016 as a one-stop shop for modern card issuing and payment processing. It has become one of Europe’s leading payment processors, delivering cutting-edge, globally scalable card solutions across the region.

"Payment often is the least fun part of online shopping, but together we are making it as slick and as smooth as possible,” says Denise Johansson, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Enfuce.

Both companies collaborated closely with Visa. Visa's wide acceptance network was a key factor for Starcart, as it needed to make a large number of shops available in its service.

“At Visa, we support innovative fintech companies that can create social added value in their own markets. I believe that Starcart’s innovative payment solution, which has potential to significantly streamline the e-shopping experience by saving customers time and effort in searching for products and comparing prices, falls into this category," says Juha Sillanpää, Visa's country manager for Finland and the Baltics.

Together, Starcart, Enfuce and Visa developed an embedded virtual card payments solution that was fast, secure, and compliant, and customised to Starcart's unique requirements. It was an unusual set-up—the consumer triggers the payment, but the card is issued to Starcart. Visa's role was therefore bigger than normal, and there were a number of challenges the partners had to overcome.

How does it work? When a customer checks out their shopping cart, they can pay Starcart by card, BNPL invoice, or in instalments. Embedded onto the platform, a virtual disposable Visa prepaid card is instantly issued to Starcart by Enfuce. Starcart’s sophisticated automation—already used to confirm the prices and shipping fees of products in the shopping cart—pays for the products using Starcart's virtual card. It's all done in one click and takes just seconds. The issued cards are managed securely to prevent any possibilities for misuse or fraud.

Starcart launched in the spring of 2022. From start to finish, it took just a year to turn an idea into a powerful new proposition and an industry first.

The result? As of March 2023—less than a year after launch—growth in sales volume had exceeded 30% per month. That's all the more impressive given that e-commerce is a cyclical business, with volumes tending to drop after holiday and peak sales seasons.

Starcart now serves tens of thousands of customers, who find its combination of low prices and convenience a great help amid soaring mortgage rates and inflationary pressures. Feedback on the customer experience has been overwhelmingly positive, with an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5, based on reviews prompted after every purchase.

Retailers, meanwhile, are benefitting from sales they weren't even expecting, from customers they might never have been able to reach. Larger merchants are happy with the additional sales, and small-and-medium-sized sellers can now compete on a level playing field against big brand names.

The partnership between Starcart, Enfuce and Visa is transforming the way consumers shop online. And there's much more to come, as Starcart eyes expansion across Europe.