Vroom Delivery and Finix Team on Convenience Store Payments

Convenience store commerce platform Vroom Delivery has launched a partnership with payment processor Finix.

The collaboration, announced Monday (April 8), is centered around the creation of a new tool called Pay360, which the companies say is the first online payment solution designed for the convenience store sector, allowing for the secure online sale of age-restricted products.

“Retailers that sell age-restricted products online are often deemed higher risk by legacy payment processors due to increased fraud associated with these items,” the companies said in a news release.

“This often leads to significantly higher processing rates and chargebacks, all which drag on retailers’ bottom lines. Vroom has worked with leading payment and fraud prevention companies to solve this problem while still lowering costs.”

With Finix’s vertically integrated payment solution and other third-party machine-learning fraud prevention systems, Vroom can lower the risk of selling these items online and while offering significantly below-market processing rates for them.

“For online merchants, winning the high-stakes battle against fraud and cybersecurity breaches is critical to survival,” PYMNTS wrote last week, noting recent research showing that 82% of U.S. eCommerce firms with cross-border sales faced security-related challenges in the last year.

“These issues also negatively impact other aspects of business, enhancing the need for fraud prevention. As a result, 95% of merchants are actively upgrading anti-fraud toolkits or planning to do so in the next 12 months.”

Aside from fraud prevention, these eCommerce merchants expect the innovations will enhance customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

Those are just a few of the insights found in “Fraud Management in Online Transactions,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Nuvei collaboration that examines the challenges merchants face in fighting fraud and their appetite for innovative fraud prevention solutions.

The report also found that 44% of merchants outsource their fraud prevention operations to specialized third-party providers, with businesses in this group seeing a dramatically lower average failed payment rate of 8.5% — 32% less than the 13% rate found at merchants that handle their anti-fraud efforts internally.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this year that “convenience stores are increasingly looking to digital technologies to drive customer loyalty.”

Among them is the major convenience retail chain Casey’s General Stores, which shared in an earnings presentation late last year that membership in its loyalty program membership has risen to 7.3 million, up from 7 million the previous quarter and 5.8 million last year.

Casey’s noted that the program yields “higher transaction value” and “more frequent visits,” as well as enabling the retailer to deploy “personalized marketing to influence guest behavior.”