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Citcon USA LLC is looking to connect U.S. e-commerce merchants with an array of digital wallets used by consumers in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The San Jose, Calif.-based company said late Thursday a single integration will enable transactions on more than 100 wallets used by consumers from a diverse array of nations, including Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, and South Korea.
While U.S.-based sites may sell to these markets, acceptance of widely used digital wallets in those countries can be a difficult matter, Citcon says. Its integration, it says, smooths out some of those wrinkles, including foreign-exchange and cross-border settlement issues. Meanwhile, the market is large and potentially hard for U.S. sites to ignore. In Citcon’s announcement, Chuck Huang, chief executive and founder of the company, cites an eShopWorld study showing that 55% consumers aged 18 to 34 who live outside of the United States have shopped at U.S. sites in the past year.
“U.S. e-commerce merchants have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to activate these consumers,” Huang, a former Visa Inc. executive, says in the release. “Use of local payment methods is a proven means to reduce cart abandonment for cross-border e-commerce.”
OxxO, Mercado Pago, PicPay, KakaoPay, Jkopay, GCash, Dana, and Alipay HK are among wallets included in the new service. All told, the integration will enable more than 300 million active users. Besides mobile wallets, the service supports buy now, pay later, credit and debit cards, voucher payments, and bank transfers. It also includes plug-ins for e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Platform, and SAP Hybris.
The new integration comes at a time when 6-year-old company’s merchant base has grown to include a number of brands inclined to sell overseas as well as in the United States. Clients include L’Oreal, Hermes, Texas Instruments, Nordstrom, Caesars Entertainment, MGM Resorts, Revolve, Tumi, Samsonite, Blue Nile.
It also comes as e-commerce is booming and merchants are looking to capture more of that spend. “Cross-border commerce continues to increase, and while inhibited somewhat by the Covid-19 pandemic, growth in global cross-border commerce will expand and accelerate in the years to come,” says Thad Peterson, a senior analyst at Aite Group, a Boston-based consultancy, in an email message. “Without an offering like Citcon’s or from other multi-tender providers, it’s very difficult for merchants to offer their customers the choices that they prefer.”
The Citcon integration represents a potentially significant expansion of the company’s capabilities. It started out in 2015 with technology that allows U.S. merchants in areas favored by Chinese tourists to accept Alipay and WeChat Pay, the two most popular mobile wallets in China. Its expansion into e-commerce came last summer with its launch of the plug-ins, which it estimated at the time would bring access to more than 2 billion consumers in more than 110 countries.
