Blog
In March 2022 we released the shop feature for At The Yard after more than a year of testing. It’s allowed our customers to reach a wider audience and create more opportunities for their customers to use and benefit from the facilities and services they offer.
But we didn’t want to stop there, we had more ideas to add new features and improvements which we’re highlighting in this series of posts.
This is one post of a part of multi part series of blog posts:
The obvious question you’ll be asking is; why do we need to do anything special to support the Channel Islands when it comes to the shop feature in At The Yard? Well the simple answer is money, more importantly taking payments and making sure you get paid.
As part of the checkout process, for any user of the shop, anywhere in the world, there needs to be a way of taking payment. Typically this is in the form of a debit card, credit card, or their equivalent being supplied to make payment. To facilitate this we use a payment processor - a company who acts as intermediary between At The Yard and everything to do with the actual act of taking the money and sending it to your bank account.
We use a payment processor because these companies dedicate their entire business to this specific task (in the case of Stripe processing 100’s of billions of pounds worth of transactions every year!) meaning they’re very very good at it! Their focus and their scale gives us confidence when taking payments and in turn gives your customers confidence in entering the card details.
Whilst we’re very happy with our existing payment processor they, like all companies, choose where they operate and unfortunately they don’t support the Channel Islands.
This left us with a few different options.
This was never an option we considered seriously - our customers in the Channel Islands should get the same set of features as we offer in mainland UK and all the other regions that At The Yard supports. As we had no plans on changing that we had to find a solution.
One option that we could have considered was acting as an intermediary between our yards in the Channel Islands and their customers. Whilst this would have worked it didn’t feel right to us.
Our philosophy is that your customers are your customers and your money is your money. Placing ourselves in the middle just didn’t feel right to us and so we decided it wasn’t an option we wanted to go with.
The final option was to review alternative payment processors to find one that would support the Channel Islands. If we could find one - we felt this would be the best option. It meant that we could support our customers whilst keeping them in control of their customers and their money.
Of course, as is often the case, the right thing is not always the easy thing! To support an additional payment processor meant that we’d have to completely re-engineer how the payment system worked to allow for a choice of providers to be supported.
So we bit the bullet and decided that adding an additional payment processor, whilst the most complicated, would offer the best experience. We spent the engineering resources and reviewed the available providers and settled on SumUp. SumUp is a popular payment provider that importantly already supports the Channel Islands.
Fast forward to today and the work is done and we’re pleased to announce that we can support At The Yards’ Shop feature in the Channel Islands.
For the end users, your customers, the experience is very similar - with the only significant difference being in the screen where they enter their card details. Oh, and Apple Pay/Google Pay - sadly we can’t use these at this time but will add it when/if it comes to SumUp online checkout.
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| Stripe - Checkout Page | SumUp - Checkout Page |
All in all we’re delighted with the end the result and that we could maintain feature parity across the regions we support. All whilst doing it in a way we’re proud of.
If you’re an At The Yard customer in the Channel Islands (or looking for a Yard management solution with a public facing shop) please get in touch - we’ll enable the SumUp integration for your account and you can be up and running soon after.