UK high street fashion retailer New Look is to use third-party transactional systems from PayPal.
The deal will allow New Look to offer an alternative payment method to credit and debit cards on its new e-commerce website, due for launch before the end of this year. The retailer is one of the few large fashion retailers not to have extended its product range online already.
As part of the PayPal deal, New Look has taken advantage of a strategic partnership between the transaction specialist and e-commerce software provider e-inbusiness to provide the e-commerce functionality for the new site.
Shaun Wills, New Look's strategy and business development director told IT PRO: "New Look is new to ecommerce and wanted to ensure users had an optimal experience with their online shopping. We're aiming to be the premier value fashion player in the UK online market place. E-inbusiness has been selected to write a platform that will support these ambitious growth plans over the next few years. And PayPal has been included in the mix due to our customer demographics."
A high proportion of New Look customers still use cash for payments in-store, according to Wills. "PayPal offers us one way to transact with these customers online via a PayPal account," he said. "Additionally, New Look has significant market share in the younger market, particularly the 9-to-15 age ranges and these people are normally excluded from transacting online due to credit card age limits. But many of them will have sold a CD or equivalent on Ebay and have cash to spend on PayPal accounts."
The partnership will provide New Look with a website that comes with the PayPal service pre-integrated. "A key factor in our choice of PayPal was customers are always returned to our website after completing checkout, affording us additional opportunities to sell and to generate customer loyalty by providing a seamless brand experience," Wills said.
PayPal will enable any customer with an email address to send and receive payments online. All of its hosted data flows are also fully compliant with the recently introduced Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) that mandates how retailers should process and store their customer's card data for security purposes.
