An app with which consumers can search any online store, track shipments and get price alerts. That’s what Klarna is promising with its new one-stop shopping app. Will it be the western WeChat?
“The ultimate shopping browser”
Klarna is launching a new app that promises to be an all-in-one experience for online shoppers. The Swedish payment platform argues that consumers could get lost in an increasingly confusing landscape of different e-commerce apps. Until now, the company has been best known for its pay-after-delivery service, giving consumers 21 days to pay for their online orders. But it is now expanding its service considerably.
Users can use the app to search for products across different online stores, receive offers and notifications of price drops, save items, track product deliveries, and manage their payments and returns. The app allows users to pay after delivery, even at webshops that are not a direct partner of Klarna. In the future, the plan is to centralise loyalty cards, run joint promotions and provide live streaming.
Klarna is calling it shopping 2.0: one big store for the entire world, or the “ultimate shopping browser of the future”. This ultimate browser is free for consumers, but retailers pay a commission: a fixed rate and a percentage on each purchase. The customer data stays in the hands of the individual retailer, according to Belgian news site HLN. The app will be launched in 15 countries simultaneously, including the Benelux, Germany and the United States.
The ecosystem’s quest
Online ecosystems such as these are increasingly regarded as the future of e-commerce. In China, WeChat is already a dominant all-in-one app, with which consumers do everything from chatting to shopping. Chinese people usually don’t even carry a wallet anymore in the big cities because they have WeChat. Even making doctor’s appointments and paying fines are done through the app.
In the West, no dominant platform has emerged yet. Still, the ever-growing branches of technology giants such as Facebook (now Meta), Google (excuse us, Alphabet) and, of course, Amazon suggest their arrival. The efforts made with Google Pay and Google Shopping already point towards that direction. PayPal is also competing: the American payment platform recently launched its own one-stop app, where consumers can shop and pay, manage their spending and even trade cryptocurrencies.
Too much transparency?
For these platforms, it is a matter of capturing as many consumers as possible as quickly as possible. The challenge is to collect consumer data – within an app across all categories and retailers – and create the ultimate loyalty. Every cent that people spend online must be a cent within the ecosystem. That’s the jackpot.
The only question is whether large retailers will be happy if consumers exchange their app for Klarna’s app and, thus, can compare prices and products with a single click across all webshops. After all, it is for that reason that the Swedes announced the acquisition of price comparator Pricerunner the day before yesterday. Do merchants want this much transparency online?
Want to know more about the battle between the online ecosystems and their impact on the retail landscape? Read all about it in the new book The Future of Shopping: Re-set Re-made Re-tail, which will be published by LannooCampus in March 2022.
