Four major payments strategies behind SHEIN's global expansion

SHEIN may have started as a small online retailer that sold wedding dresses, but even at the beginning, the company has its sights set on the world.

Today, the ecommerce giant is a household name and ships to over 220 countries. Its growth is built on delivering a high-quality shopping experience and convenience to shoppers worldwide. The high-profile retailer has a strong supply chain and cost management integration, along with a ubiquitous social media presence. But the key driving factor in its expansion has always been payments, as SHEIN shared.

Many global brands have been slow to adopt new payments technologies, but SHEIN recognized the importance of payments in its overall strategy, especially for global expansion.

To grow its business quickly and more efficiently, the brand had to adapt to local market conditions and optimize the shopping experience for shoppers wherever they live and shop. SHEIN chose Adyen as its payments partner to facilitate shopping for its global customer base through seamless payments and cutting-edge technology.

As SHEIN ships to over 200 markets, it’s key for the brand to be able toprocess paymentsin local currencies and offer the most popular and convenient payment methods, whether they are credit cards, mobile wallets, banking apps or other payment methods. The brand handles a staggering amount of complexity on a daily basis, and without a payments partner that understands the business, SHEIN’s growth could have been severely limited.

Working with a global payments service provider like Adyen has helped SHEIN simplify its business. Adyen's single platform solution gives brands lke SHEIN full control of their business, and makes it easier to add new payment methods as and when needed.

“With Adyen’s integrated payments platform, we can quickly add local payment methods in various markets around the world and with that, we’ve seen an increase in conversion rates,” said Ted Wang, Head of Payments of SHEIN.

Adyen's extensive support for key payment methods around the world demonstrated to SHEIN how barriers to purchase can be removed for its international customers. With Adyen's global experts, SHEIN could easily set up risk control models based on the markets' requirements, driving sales and enhancing the overall customer experience.

When expanding into new markets, it's not just shoppers' payment preferences that matter, but the risk landscape too. Particularly as SHEIN's is an ecommerce retailer, it's key to focus on payment fraud and the risk rules associated with each market. 

With Adyen, SHEIN has been able to keep payment fraud in check and optimize the authentication process across all payment methods and currencies offered – all while keeping the entire shopping experience seamless and enjoyable.

Plus, asStrong Customer Authentication (SCA)is gaining traction worldwide, Adyen has also begun deploying 3DS2 authentication for SHEIN. As one of the few global payments service provider that offers an intelligent routing verification engine along with local acquiring, Adyen has helped ensure secure payment transactions while ensuring a smooth user experience and maximizing authorization rates – securing and growing revenue for SHEIN.

Through its partnership with Adyen, SHEIN has been able to leverage technology to increase payments performance. For example, Adyen’s RevenueAccelerate has provided SHEIN with intelligent payment routing and network tokenization to achieve seamless operations. Adyen's focus on innovation and technology has also been integral in keeping SHEIN at the forefront of payments and global retail.

“Embracing new technologies also means embracing new opportunities. The market is changing rapidly, and payment requires the use of technology to ensure safety and convenience. The innovative and iterative capabilities, as well as the leading technology service experience of Adyen’s solution have helped SHEIN keep up with local payment trends, adopt the latest payment technologies and further enhance our consumer experience,” said Ted Wang, Head of Payments, SHEIN.

As a brand that’s predominantly online, in-store wasn’t a focus until a few years ago with SHEIN’s pop-up store concept in Europe, and SHEIN needed a cross-channel payments solution to be quickly implemented – something Adyen’s unified commerce solution can easily offer. Beyond extending support to in-store payments, the Adyen team of account managers, technical support as well as analytics and monitoring teams were called upon. The result: unified payments that gave insight into SHEIN’s online and in-store transactions.

“To establish a strong presence in local markets, brands going global need to continuously improve local user operations and expand local channels. Payments are one of the most critical means to connect merchants directly to local consumers. Good settlement and payment experiences not only allow various marketing strategies to be effectively implemented, but also provide a gateway for SHEIN to enter the global market," said Molly Miao, Chief Marketing Officer, SHEIN.

It may have been Adyen's end-to-end one-stop payments platform offering that first sparked SHEIN's interest. With a fully supportive Adyen team and reliable  payments infrastructure, further proven with the stability of our platform during SHEIN’s large promotional activities and shopping festivals where it had to handle large transaction volumes, Adyen has further gained SHEIN’s trust. As SHEIN continues its international expansion, we also look forward to greater milestones in our partnership.