Trusted Shops

Subscription payments you can trust

Trusted Shops has built an e-commerce world that everyone can trust, with its combination of verified customer reviews, a Trustmark certification for merchants and integrated buyer protection.

“Trust is the foundation for thriving economies but digital technologies have created new challenges for shoppers and e-commerce companies, such as fake reviews, data breaches, and fraud,” said Dr. Bastian Kolmsee, Chief Product Officer. “Our ambition is to build a community of trust that helps merchants and millions of consumers around the world to connect safely.”

Businesses pay a subscription for membership to the Trusted Shops programme, which is automatically collected and reconciled using GoCardless integrated with the Zuora subscription management platform.

Highly dependable

Trusted Shops partnered with GoCardless five years ago, when Direct Debit was first introduced to the German market.

“Direct Debit is now one of the market’s best-loved payment methods,” said Günay Edgü, Commercial Manager and System Operator. “So a stable solution is needed to keep customers happy and GoCardless never lets us down. But then, that’s exactly what we expected because it scored so highly during our rigorous selection process, especially because of its open API and connection to Zuora.”

Trusted Shops implemented GoCardless and Zuora at the same time, in a process Günay described as quiet and smooth. “We were able to do our tests in sandboxes to first prove our requirements could be met, and the go-live process was seamless from there,” he added.

Automation at scale 

Trusted Shops is a tech company at heart, so it knows the value of automation when working at scale. This is something it has had to quickly adapt to since the COVID pandemic, when the general rush to e-commerce saw its business suddenly grow by 30% in just a couple of years.

“Scalability is important for us — we now have 40 million consumer memberships and 30,000 merchants, while payments have grown from a few thousand to several hundreds of thousands,” said Bastian.

Bastian added that this automation had resulted in some handy time savings for the team: “Thanks to the automation enabled by GoCardless’ direct API to Zuora, the finance team saves several minutes per transaction on the B2B side, which is the time it would take to manually match incoming wire transfers to receivables.”

And because incoming and outgoing payments are synchronised across GoCardless and Zuora and ultimately transferred to Trusted Shops’ general ledger in SAP, finance also always has access to the latest data for reporting.

Going the extra mile 

During the high growth years and beyond, Trusted Shops has leaned on its GoCardless Customer Success Manager for support.

“Our Customer Success Manager always has an open ear whenever we have a new idea,” said Günay. “They are the bridge between our requirements and the teams building the GoCardless solution, and they’ve never been afraid to go the extra mile to help us build a better business.”

One of those new ideas that Günay’s team is working on is a project to automate the chasing of late payments using data from GoCardless.

“GoCardless’ data will help us to trigger automated dunning notices and populate them with the right content, so we can build an efficient process while still being sensitive to the customer relationship,” he said. “Looking to the future we are also interested in seeing how open banking data, which GoCardless can help us access, could make collection attempts at times when we know there are sufficient funds in customers’ accounts.”

Aiming for the top

Payments innovation like this is a key driver of Trusted Shops’ push to become Europe’s number one for safe and secure e-commerce.

“GoCardless gives us the confidence we need to intensify our business across Europe,” said Günay. “Our operations team has complete faith that the solution is stable, no matter what we throw at it. And, with constantly changing technological and legal requirements, alongside growing opportunities to use open banking to improve the customer experience and increase retention, it’s game changing to have a partner we can count on.”