Braintree Extend launches

It’s the ultimate pursuit, but because of challenging integrations, it’s often easier said than done. Especially when it comes to payments, because while many companies are eagerly pursuing more integrated experiences with partners, they may want to move away from handling payment information directly. To that end, we want to help you deliver on those partnerships, while keeping you and your users safe.

Today, we’re introducing Braintree Extend: a solution that directly addresses these payment challenges. Braintree Extend powers three types of partnerships: transaction services, rewards and loyalty, and contextual commerce. Keeping users’ data secure is one of our core tenets, which we accomplish through the Braintree Vault, where merchants tokenize and store payment information.

Transaction services enhance transaction processing on the back end, helping you manage complexity in your environment. This may include unifying disparate payment systems, working with a specialized fraud-service providers, or dual-vaulting a user’s payment information for increased availability and redundancy.

For example, to help minimize fraud and manage risk, Vivid Seats leverages Braintree Extend to seamlessly connect with its fraud detection partner that specializes in ticketing. Monoprice uses Braintree as its central vault and leverages Braintree Extend to mirror that data in a secondary vault for backup. This creates high availability and redundancy to maintain stability.

Rewards and loyalty programs drive user engagement and the stickiness of your platform. However, they can require burdensome engineering and/or significant business-development efforts. To help increase efficiency, merchants can partner with rewards platforms, online-to-offline commerce platforms, and even directly with card networks to provide cash-back or card-linked offers. The user’s card information acts as the consumer identifier, and merchants can leverage Braintree Extend to securely share this on the user’s behalf so that purchases can be appropriately tracked and rewards accrued.

For instance, Braintree Extend helps to power Yelp Cash Back, Yelp’s card-linked loyalty program. Deployed with thousands of merchants, users sign up with Yelp and receive real-time cash rebates at the point of sale when dining and shopping with participating merchants.

Contextual commerce, while still in its infancy in some markets, has already begun to drive value for users in others such as Asia. Merchants are partnering with other merchants and platforms to help enable users to purchase directly on new channels — i.e., the places they first discover products and services. In many cases, the discovery platform acts as an aggregator, provides content, and owns the checkout experience, but may not want to take on the work or liability of post-purchase activities. Likewise, merchants themselves want to have a direct relationship with these consumers they’ve found via third-party channels rather than risk losing them to potentially conversion-slashing click-throughs and redirects.

For example, Bandsintown, a music artist- and performance-discovery platform, leverages Braintree Extend to connect to various ticketing companies — that way, a user can discover and select shows and purchase tickets end-to-end without leaving the Bandsintown platform. Skyscanner, the popular metasearch engine and price comparison tool, created its direct-booking platform on top of Braintree Extend, where it hosts the entire checkout and securely connects multiple airlines and partners to complete the checkout. And Slickdeals, a leading deal community and shopping platform, created its own end-to-end direct-checkout experience to engage more deeply with users while helping increase conversion for its connected merchants.

Today’s savvy users demand effortless commerce experiences — which require secure, seamless payment experiences — regardless of where checkout begins. Braintree Extend helps enable those experiences, and is the next phase in our overall mission to become the Commerce Operating System for our merchants and partners. We’ve already helped some of our most strategic merchants and partners enter into this new frontier of commerce, and are excited about even more interesting use cases to come!