Yandex.Checkout to provide payments for companies via Telegram bots

June 2, 2017

Yandex.Checkout, Russia’s leading payment service provider, enabled online stores to accept payments via Telegram Bots, allowing their customers to pay for goods and services directly in the messenger. Telegram introduced chatbots nearly two years ago, but it’s only now that the company brought support for payments for chatbots. Yandex.Checkout became the first payment provider in Russia to offer this option to companies.

Merchants can now add the new functionality to any Telegram Bot in order to allow customers to buy stuff without even having to leave Telegram: movie tickets, mobile communication, flower delivery and so on. To pay for the purchase, customers need to enter their bank card details in the chat with the Bot and confirm the payment with one touch. Companies can change the ordering script and customize the Bot for their needs to specify the time of delivery, offer to supplement the order with other products, ask for a phone number or, for example, make a discount for a customer’s birthday.

«For Russia, the instant messenger payment model is brand new, but it has already been successfully applied abroad, for example, in China. Telegram looks to be following the footsteps of messaging giants like WeChat — where messaging apps are integrated with offline commerce and electronic wallets. Telegram, which has some 100 million users, has evolved from a simple communication platform into an entire ecosystem, which can now solve the payment tasks of the user. Accepting payments in this new way will suit both small companies that work with their clients mainly through social networks and messengers, and large businesses. We are planning to add the option of sending payments via Telegram using Yandex.Money e-wallets, online banking and other Yandex.Checkout payment methods in the nearest future», — says Dmitry Polozov, Head of Product at Yandex.Checkout.

The option to accept payments via Telegram has become available with the release of a special API with the «Pay» button. To set up the acceptance of payments in the messenger, a company needs to connect to Yandex.Checkout, create a Telegram Bot that will communicate with their customers, and connect it to the Yandex.Checkout Payment Bot. The store or service can activate the Telegram Bot via chat with @BotFather. Next one needs to select Yandex.Checkout as the payment provider in the «Payments» tab and enter the unique shopid identifier provided by Yandex.Checkout. Once the Bot is set up, the acceptance of payments will be automatically activated.

Telegram is not the first experience for Yandex.Money with payments in different environments. For example, Yandex.Checkout provides built-in chat payments for online stores with JivoSite. In four months of 2017, users of the service in general have spent 1.5 times more money via chats than in the entire year of 2016. This year, from January to April, the number of such payments has increased by 1.7 times. Recently, Yandex.Checkout has also implemented the option for companies to accept payments via the SendPulse email newsletters.

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About Yandex.Checkout

Yandex.Checkout is the leading service for accepting online payments in Russia, according to a 2017 survey by MARC. Yandex.Checkout received the Emerging Payment Award at the Merchant Payments Ecosystem conference (Berlin) in 2017. With this payment solution, merchants from all over the world can offer Russian consumers the online payment methods most popular among Russians and CIS-citizens: bank cards, e-wallets, online banking, mobile phones, QR codes, contactless technologies of Apple Pay and Android Pay as well as cash via mobile retailers and payment kiosks (there are over 250 thousand cash-acceptance points all over CIS). Currently, more than 76,000 online stores across the globe use Yandex.Checkout. The service helps to organize payment systems for websites and mobile applications, as well as billing systems via SMS, e-mail, chats or instant messengers. Thanks to the «Smart Payment» technology, Yandex.Checkout can adapt the payment process specifically for each user.

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