How Birchbox doubled its mobile conversions with Adyen

For Birchbox co-founders Katia and Hayley, shopping for beauty products online was confusing. Not only was the choice overwhelming but, with new products released all the time, how was anyone supposed to know what to buy?

As a solution they launched Birchbox, a monthly subscription service that sends a customized selection of the latest beauty samples, along with tutorials and other content, direct to the shopper’s door. In this way customers can test new products, without breaking the bank, and then buy their favorites in full-size from Birchbox’s ecommerce site. 

6 years later, Birchbox has emerged as a main player in the beauty ecommerce landscape, attracting more than one million of active subscribers worldwide. 

The online cosmetic industry is growing fast and increasingly competitive. Therefore for Birchbox the user experience is always the main priority, and the ecommerce site has been designed with the sole principal of providing a simple, practical and seamless customer flow. 

Critical to this, is a frictionless checkout experience. Before working with Adyen, shoppers where redirected to an external payment gateway to complete a payment. This not only slows the process, but hurts conversions, if the shopper doesn’t trust the site and abandons the purchase. 

In March 2016, Birchbox turned to Adyen to optimize its web and mobile payments. 

Adyen was able to eliminate the redirect in the payment process. Its fully integrated payments platform handles the whole payment flow, and the shopper never leaves the Birchbox site. Further, thanks to Adyen’s Easy Encryption integration, unencrypted payment data never touches Birchbox’s server, significantly reducing the company’s scope for PCI compliance.  

The whole integration and migration to the Adyen platform was rolled out at record speed, and now Birchbox customers benefit from a simple and harmonious online experience from homepage, right through to checkout, and for every subsequent recurring payment. 

As a result of this optimized customer flow, mobile conversions, which account for 60% of Birchbox’s traffic, increased by 100%.

“The fluidity and simplicity of the customer journey is a key challenge in building the perfect online experience. Thanks to Adyen’s solution, we reduced the number of clicks and swipes in the payment flow, and entry errors have been reduced.” Martin Balas, CTO Birchbox

The next focus for Birchbox and Adyen is to further optimize the payment flow to ensure an ongoing quality experience for its customers. Central to this is reducing involuntary churn, which is when a subscription is cancelled or paused without the customer’s knowledge. A key reason for this is transactions that fail due to technical errors in legacy payment systems. To combat this, Adyen can dive into the reasons behind declined transactions, and automatically retry transactions that failed due to a temporary technical issue. 

Further, thanks to Adyen’s ownership over the entire payment flow, it is able to provide Birchbox with in-depth data insights, which the company can use to fine-tune its processes, delivering a quality, uninterrupted service to its customers. 

“Doubling our mobile conversions is an excellent start. Now we look forward to digging deep into Adyen’s automation and data tools to ensure our customers benefit from the best possible experience, from initial signup, right through the ongoing relationship.” Martin Balas