Yandex.Checkout Is Launching Payments via QR-Codes for Merchants

July 28, 2016

Yandex.Checkout is launching a new feature for merchants: the ability to accept payments through QR-codes. Sellers will simply need to place QR-codes on their merchandise, and customers will be able to scan the code through the Yandex.Money mobile application.

QR-codes can be placed either on material goods (pizza boxes, books, bills, etc.), documents (courier’s application for delivery registrations, on a web site page for payment confirmation, etc.) or on digital products (online movie streaming services, music, etc.)

To make a payment, users simply open the Yandex.Money app on their phones and point at a QR-code with their smartphone’s camera. Once the code is scanned, the app will show the product’s name, seller, and price. After that, a user chooses a payment method — either Yandex.Money e-wallet or a bank card linked to it.

«QR-codes are an extremely convenient tool for making payments that sellers can place on material or online platforms: whether on a door at a national park allowing customers to make a charitable donation, or on buses that will help passengers pay for a ride,» says Maria Gracheva, CEO of Yandex.Money. «We are sure that QR-codes have great potential to become extremely popular for payments.»

All merchants using the payment aggregator Yandex.Checkout can get access to a QR-codes generator to set codes on their products. Currently, more than 76,000 online stores use Yandex.Checkout, and 4 million users have the Yandex.Money app that has iOS, Android, and Windows Phone versions.

According to a joint study by Yandex.Market and GfK, more than 30% of online consumers regularly make purchases via mobile platforms (smartphones or tablets). Yandex.Checkout reported that in 2015 the number of mobile payments increased by 30%. The number of online stores at which customers pay via mobile platforms grew by 60%. Last year, the share of mobile payments in Yandex.Money’s total processing volume was 20%.

Yandex.Checkout is a leading service for accepting online payments in Russia, according to a 2016 survey by MARC. With this payment solution, merchants from all over the world can offer Russian consumers the online payment methods most popular in Russia: bank cards, e-wallets, mobile phones, and cash via mobile retailers and payment kiosks (there are over 250 thousand cash-acceptance points all over the country). Currently, more than 76,000 online stores across the globe use Yandex.Checkout.

Yandex.Checkout was launched by Yandex.Money in 2013. Yandex.Money is the joint venture of search engine Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX), and Sberbank, the largest bank in Russia. Yandex.Money also offers consumers easy, safe, and reliable methods of paying online on its own site and mobile app. The service hosts about 25 million user accounts with about 15,000 new accounts opened daily.