Retail Industry Case Study

Retail Industry Case Study

Realex Payments Support Party Delight s Successful European Expansion THE OVERVIEW Party Delights is the UK s leading supplier of themed party and celebration accessories. The award-winning business has operated as a pure-play online retailer since its creation in 2001 and prides itself on its vast range of products and easy to use website, that makes every purchase as simple and fun for customers as the parties they re buying for. Integral to creating this superior shopping experience is providing a fast, seamless and secure payments process. In early 2013, Party Delights was acquired by American party giant, Party City, a company with a billion dollar turnover and over 800 stores throughout the US. Party Delights began growing its European presence over the past two years, putting even more pressure on its payments system to deliver cross-border transactions securely and efficiently. A secure and reliable payment provider was essential for scaling the business as part of their expansion strategy. Following a recommendation from a banking partner, Party Delights were immediately impressed upon meeting with Realex Payments. After full evaluation, Party Delights confirmed that the solution and service were a perfect match for their ambitions and moved onto the Realex Payments platform in 2012. PARTY DELIGHTS & REALEX PAYMENTS From our first meeting with Realex Payments the team was professional and personable, which is very important to us. They also proved themselves to be very knowledgeable, providing great advice and instilling us with confidence in the service from day one. Paul Shuttleworth Technical Director - Party Delights

The Challenge Having grown rapidly over the years and with its sights set on European expansion, Party Delights was acutely aware that its payments systems were not up to scratch. PCI DSS As with all retailers accepting card payments, Party Delights had to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) set out by the card schemes to protect card holder data. Paul Shuttleworth, Technical Director at Party Delights explained how compliance first initiated issues with its payments systems: Delivering great customer service as well as products is absolutely at the heart of what we do, and part of this is ensuring that all our customer transactions are secure. We understand the importance of protecting cardholder data, but PCI compliance can be a very time consuming and expensive process. For us, the most effective way to simplify PCI compliance was to move to a hosted payments environment. EUROPEAN EXPANSION Party Delights was also looking for a payment provider that could support its expansion into Europe. It needed a payments solution that could cope with increased capacity, support cross-border payments and provide functionality for multiple languages with no impact on the customer experience. Party Delights was also keen to ensure there was no downtime in payments availability during the integration of a new payments solution.

The Solution After meeting with a number of providers, Party Delights chose Realex Payments for its simple and straight forward redirect hosted payment page solution to enhance shopper confidence and simplify PCI compliance. Using the Realex Payments solution, Party Delights customers are now redirected to a customised payments page hosted on the Realex Payments secure server. Realex Payments collects card details and processes the payment before seamlessly returning the customer to the Party Delights website. Shuttleworth commented on the benefits of the Realex Payments hosted payments page. The solution is absolutely perfect for us, we don t handle any cardholder details which simplifies our PCI obligations. Being able to customise the page with our own branding is also a real bonus as it smooths out the payments process and helps give our customers confidence at the checkout. Realex Payments really delivers on customer experience, it s fast, reliable and completely seamless. Expanding into Europe is a real focus for us and working with Realex Payments has made this even easier. Not only have they developed a number of bespoke elements to optimise the payments process in each country, they ve introduced us to valuable partners to support our local payment method offering in each geography. Realex Payments offers more customisation than our previous supplier and really simplifies the payments process for the shopper whilst delivering an efficient way to help us meet the necessary PCI regulations. Paul Shuttleworth Technical Director - Party Delights

The Results Since working with Realex Payments, Party Delights has experienced an increase in uptime and improved the shopping experience for customers, whilst meeting PCI DSS requirements. Realex Payments provided the following: A scalable, reliable payment system - Realex Payments is dedicated to the maintenance of its unsurpassed system resilience record. Realex Payments operates over two data centres with active-active configuration and no single point of failure. Failover is provided at a site and component level and a complete site failover executes within approximately 90 seconds A fully customisable hosted payment page - The Realex Payment hosted payment page provides a seamless payment process across all mobile devices. The latest responsive design technology is used to ensure that the payment page resolves across all brands and types of devices. The hosted payment page is fully customisable and alleviates much of the PCI-DSS responsibility Localisation support - Realex Payments are happy to support local language requirements as specified by every individual business, providing flexible functionality to maximise the localisation throughout the payment process to ensure that transactions can process as normal and the merchant can deliver a positive customer experience throughout checkout European expansion solutions - Realex Payments have an established and comprehensive acquiring network, offering domestic processing in all the major ecommerce markets and global access through connections into all UK international acquiring platforms. In addition, Realex Payments have integrated into all the major Alternative Payment Methods (APMs) across Europe ensuring your customers have the choice to make payments through their preferred method Top quality account management and customer service - The dedicated integration and support team provided proactive and responsive support to Party Delights during the on-boarding process. A dedicated corporate account manager is on hand to support and work with Party Delights to scale their business in the UK and Europe Paul Shuttleworth commented on the results and concluded on the partnership by saying: The performance of the Realex Payments solution has been great from day one and has brought real improvements to our business. Integration was simple and smooth with no downtime. The reporting system saves us time and money by reducing the man hours spent on administration. The money transfer and reconciliation process from Realex Payments to ourselves is much quicker than with our previous supplier which is a great financial benefit. We can t stress just how incredible the support service is, it is the best and most reactive service we have had from any supplier. The reliability and functionality of Realex Payments solutions, combined with a dedicated service manager who knows our business and reacts to any issues instantly, makes the service that Realex Payments provides invaluable.

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