You can now build a seamless and integrated purchasing experience that allows customers to complete their purchase inside your digital media platform without being redirected to external websites or third-party payment gateways. That’s right, your audience can discover products, select items, and make payments, all without leaving a platform.

*Chef’s kiss.* 

The benefits of native checkout are overwhelming - and, unfortunately for many digital media companies, so is the implementation.

Implementing a native checkout experience requires integration with various systems and APIs. This can include integrating payment gateways, product catalogs, order management systems (OMSs), shipping providers, and other backend systems. Each integration must be carefully executed to ensure data accuracy, security, and smooth communication between the marketplace and these external systems.

For so many organizations, the desire to provide a seamless user experience surpasses the resources (and understanding of what’s required) for a true native checkout. The result? The Front End Trap.  It often creates an experience that appears to be native checkout for your users…but appearances can be deceiving. 

What Does it Mean to Fake a Native Checkout?

Behind every fake native checkout is an unscalable team who manually manages reorders. While the consumer believes they’ve successfully submitted their payment and placed an order, the reality is that another team is then responsible for copying the order into the merchant’s website, while owning any discrepancies along the way. Because the product data on the marketplace isn’t updated in real time, inventory, shipping, and tax information can all be incorrect or missing.

Faking a native checkout through data scraping and manual reordering is an archaic solution that results in headaches for your team, reduces your revenue, and bottlenecks your scalability (trust us, we’ve heard horror stories from our customers). If you’re invested in growing and sustaining  an ecommerce revenue stream, you absolutely need to understand the risks of faking a native checkout. Let's take a deeper look: 

Risks of Faking a Native Checkout 

Evading the Accuracy Quandary: The Intricacies of Data Scraping

Without a true native checkout, the quest for up-to-date product information becomes arduous. Channels often resort to data scraping or web crawling solutions. However, relying on scraped data comes at a cost, as it frequently leads to inaccurate and outdated inventory details. The unfortunate consequence is the inadvertent promotion of goods that are no longer in stock - and delayed communication to the consumer buying it. (Prepare your team for handling refunds.) 

Unsynchronized Carts: The Hidden Mysteries of Shipping and Taxes

Even if inventory is in stock, another prevalent issue emerges – missing  or inaccurate shipping and tax information from external merchants without native checkout. This information is required to create an accurate order in the merchant’s system.  Every addition to a shopper's cart introduces an enigmatic percentage increase to the final transaction. As a result, the channel often absorbs shipping and/or tax costs, opting to provide free shipping to maintain customer satisfaction.

The Inflexible Headcount: Unveiling the Challenges of Manual Order Entry

By relying on human resources for manual order reentry, channels find themselves trapped in an inelastic headcount dilemma. Real-time fluctuations in orders pose a significant challenge:  how to swiftly adjust team size to meet demand. The reliance on individuals to painstakingly replicate orders with merchants restricts a marketplace's response to the ever-changing tides of customer demand.

The Merchant of Record Quandary: Unraveling Legal and Financial Implications

As channel sites directly accept funds from shoppers, they unwittingly assume the role of the merchant of record. This shift brings forth an array of legal and financial implications, including  responsibilities and complexities that may not have been planned for. Navigating the legal landscape becomes paramount, ensuring compliance and mitigating risks associated with this newfound role.

Point of Contact Amidst Darkness: The Post-Purchase Journey Conundrum

The channel's newfound responsibility as the point of contact throughout the post-purchase journey also adds complexity. Updating shipping, tracking information, and managing returns or exchanges becomes an additional burden on the channel. Without streamlined processes and established protocols for providing seamless post-purchase support, both shoppers and the channel are left stumbling in the dark.

The Takeaway:

Mimicking native checkout may initially seem appealing, but it ultimately fails to provide the necessary functionality to complete sales and retain customers. Yes, the user experience of the front end needs to be seamless - however, a marketplace’s platform also needs to create and submit accurate orders, from multiple vendors, in real time. (Believe us, it can be done.) 

What lures most businesses into the Front End Trap is the sheer lift of integrating with an ecommerce platform, much less a second integration. That’s where we come in; with Violet, you can execute your vision without worrying about the complexities and limitations of backend integrations, or the multi-year roadmap. It's time to build your product, innovate on your front end UX, and leave the backend integration to us. Learn more here.