Appmax grows sevenfold helping customers beat fraud and ‘digital bureaucracy’

Fraud, cart abandonment and loyalty. These are three of the biggest issues of those who undertake online business and it is precisely to them that the brothers Betina and Marcos Wecker directed their efforts. “The Appmax idea started in 2015, when my brother Marcos and I started to develop technologies to maximize results in e-commerce. Our intention was to optimize results for sales and conversion. We had in mind that online commerce could not be the same (facing the same difficulties) as physical stores”, explained Betina, Appmax’s VP of business development, comparing a queue in high street to a delay in checkout (completion of the order), for example.

Founded in 2018, also with the participation of Gustavo Krüger, the startup not only facilitates payment processing, but also helps companies to retain customers, acting on three fronts: AppCheckout (developed to customize the payment experience, offering additional products in the purchase and recovering lost customers), AppPag (an algorithm that facilitates the approval of payments by giving preference to the reassessment of purchases refused due to system failure) and AppMarketing (a multi-channel system to recover abandoned carts and increase sales through upsells/cross-sells).

It is on this third front that 25% of the approximately 600 employees of Appmax are. Through AppMarketing, the startup claims to be able to raise the average ticket of companies or at least recover purchases that were about to be abandoned. “If you enter a store, fill your cart with products but don’t complete the purchase, we have a team that gets in touch by Message or phone calls to talk about the products and convince you to continue with the purchase. Today, we can have up to 30% success in rescuing abandoned carts”, detailed Betina.

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“We try to automate a lot of things, but the human touch is still very important. There are many stages of the sale that a machine or algorithm cannot yet contribute, and the human part is the main point, even if aided by technology,” she commented.

Betina explains that 60% to 70% of card transactions, on average, are approved. “That is, out of every ten attempts, only six or seven have their purchases approved. AppPag’s anti-fraud technology identifies (in advance) cases that can be canceled improperly, such as when a family member is using your card with your authorization. We cross data to identify cases like this and prevent payment cancellation. Also, we have the smart retry feature. If the credit card is not approved within a millisecond, we retry once or twice to ensure the negotiation is successful. Many times the purchase is not approved due to system desynchronization, and our method ensures that cases like this do not prevent the completion of the purchase”, commented Betina. Appmax did not reveal how data crossing for payment approval works.

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Appmax experienced remarkable growth during the pandemic, when several businesses had to migrate online in order to survive the isolation measures of the global health crisis. Between 2020 and 2022, the number of websites using Appmax jumped from 2,000 to 15,000.

“We’ve been on the other side of the business, we know the pain of the digital entrepreneur. During the pandemic, our growth was very accelerated. Something we expected a few years from now, happened in months. We had many opportunities and managed to embrace a good part of them”, said the company’s co-founder.

To uphold the demand, Appmax needed to establish some partnerships. According to Betina, contracts with companies such as Mastercard and Visa were not only positive but also required by Brazil’s Central Bank regulation.

Betina does not reveal revenue or profit figures, but says that the company’s revenue in the first three months of 2022 already corresponds to 40% of the total earned in 2021, a year in which the number of employees doubled and reached the mark of BRL 1 billion transacted. through its solutions.

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Appmax’s revenue comes from payment processing plus a percentage of additional sales generated. The values vary from 12% to 20% according to the customer segment.

After scaling its operation alone, the company is now looking for external investors, willing to help it improve its technologies and find professionals who have synergy with its activities, especially with regard to customer experience.