How did payment APIs fundamentally shift ecommerce from a technology problem to a customer experience opportunity?
Hans Tesselaar, Executive Director, BIAN Payment APIs drive increased efficiency. In the past, ecommerce transactions have been completed in siloes, often requiring the consumer to input larger amounts of data, e. g. card number, decreasing the number of successful conversions.
Then, in the 2010s, investment in APIs grew. This growth was encouraged exponentially when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
Overnight, the high street closed, and the public turned online. With a more focused audience came pressure from competition.
The goal was clear; as consumer expectations keep rising, investing in visitor experience became even more vital to procure and retain customers.
Now, 60 % of revenue generated by ecommerce portals is done through APIs. Evidently, retailers have seen the opportunity to improve the customer experience, adopting new financial services to reduce unnecessary friction in the check-out procedure and integrating subscription models into services to reduce customer churn.
Eddie Harrison, Chief Growth Officer and Co-founder, Navro Before payment APIs, setting up an e-commerce business meant spending a huge amount of time and money building the systems needed to accept payments. This was a messy, complicated process that was prone to errors. Then, payment APIs like Stripe and Braintree came along and made that whole issue disappear.
They took all the complex, behindthe-scenes work and turned it into a simple tool businesses could plug right in. Suddenly, a company could stop worrying about the tech and place all their focus on the customer experience – things like making the checkout process faster, personalising the flow and building loyalty.
“ Payment APIs like Stripe and Braintree came along and took all the complex, behind-the-scenes work and turned it into a simple tool”
EDDIE HARRISON, CHIEF GROWTH OFFICER AND CO-FOUNDER, NAVRO
100 October 2025