An e-commerce technology unit eBay sold last fall after separating from PayPal has reformulated itself as Radial, tailoring its services for online merchants that want to make the leap to omnichannel commerce.
The King of Prussia, Pa.-based company,
Targeting midsize merchants with annual sales between $25 million and $200 million, Radial aims to handle the lion's share of e-commerce retailers' tasks that take place after a consumer makes the decision to buy an item, including payments, fraud, order fulfillment and shipping, said Bryan Heron, senior product manager of payments and fraud for Radial.
"We take over after the click, managing the entire order lifecycle from checkout and payment to delivering the merchandise," Heron said.
Merchants pay only for completed sales, Heron said, noting that Radial shoulders all of the fraud risk associated for online transactions.
"More merchants are worried about fraud migrating online, and there's no doubt fraudsters are getting more sophisticated, so we can take that concern away," Heron said.
Radial's platform pulls from its own big data and layers of historical merchandise shipments to minimize fraud. The company also uses its own technology and distribution centers to manage orders and shipping, answering consumers' growing expectations of accessing merchandise through multiple channels.
"Increasingly people want to be able to shop through any channel, buy an item anywhere, receive it anywhere and return it anywhere, and that's a tough expectation to meet for online merchants in the middle that have strong online sales but aren't big enough to build their own omnichannel engines," Heron said.
The company's platform also enables online merchants to accept payments from anywhere in the world, Heron said.
In its previous incarnation under eBay, Radial, which employs about 7,000 employees around the world, helped emerging online merchants with e-commerce marketing and management. The unit took shape after eBay acquired the e-commerce firm of GSI Commerce Inc. in June 2011 and renamed it eBay Enterprise.
When eBay split with PayPal, it freed the enterprise unit to work with any payments provider, and now that Radial is separate from eBay, it's expanding its reach to all types of merchants operating in the omnichannel ecosystem, Heron said.
A big part of the consulting Radial provides to e-commerce merchants focuses on the proper mix of payments to accept on their website, he said.
"One thing we don't recommend is throwing 14 different payment methods on a website," he said. "Each merchant has a mix of customers in its market or its country that make the most sense for that audience and type of merchandise, whether it's credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay or a combination of those, and we help merchants figure that out," Heron said.
