Accepting Pay-easy in Japan

Pay-easy lets a Japanese customer settle an online order through their bank, either at an ATM or in internet banking, using a set of reference numbers issued at checkout. It is widely used for bills, taxes and higher-value purchases where a customer prefers a bank transaction to a card.

Timing

The payment happens after the order, not with it

As with konbini, the order is unpaid at checkout and remains so until the customer completes the transfer, which may not happen at all. Reporting the order as revenue overstates sales, ties up stock and produces abandonment figures that are really non-payment figures. Expiry logic and reporting that separates ordered from paid are not optional in a Japanese operation.

Why Japanese customers choose a bank route

Reluctance to enter card details online, preference for bank-mediated transactions, and comfort with reference-based payment all sustain it, particularly at higher order values. Because it skews to larger baskets, the working capital tied up between order and payment is proportionally more significant than the transaction count suggests.

Cost

Where the cost sits

Typically a fixed fee per issued transaction rather than a percentage, which makes it inexpensive on high basket values. The genuine cost is delay and non-payment, both measurable and neither visible on the payments line of your accounts.

Reference

What the reference numbers have to survive

A Pay-easy order ends with the customer holding a set of numbers rather than a completed payment, and everything between that moment and the transfer is yours to design. This is a checkout question rather than a pricing one, and it moves the paid rate further than any fee negotiation will.

The numbers have to survive leaving your site. They belong in the confirmation email as well as on the screen, in a form that can be copied rather than as an image, with the amount and the deadline immediately beside them rather than in a separate paragraph further down. A customer standing at an ATM two days later is working from whatever they can find on a phone, and if the email requires scrolling past marketing to reach the numbers, a share of those orders ends there.

Then the reminder. One message before expiry, carrying the same numbers and stating the deadline as a date rather than as a number of days, recovers orders that were never abandoned in any meaningful sense. They were forgotten. Nothing else about this method is as cheap to change or as easy to measure, because the before and after is simply your paid rate.

Which payment provider supports Pay-easy in Japan?

GMO Payment Gateway, DG Financial Technology and KOMOJU in Japan, alongside dLocal, all document Pay-easy, among others, usually alongside konbini. The useful questions are the cost per issued transaction versus per paid transaction, your unpaid rate, your average time to payment, and whether your reporting distinguishes the two.

Unpaid

The delay and the non-payment are very different sizes

The section above says the real cost is delay and non-payment, both measurable and neither on the payments line. Here they are separated, because one of them is roughly twenty-five times the other and the small one gets all the attention.

Delay first. Take 1.2 million euros of Pay-easy volume paid in a year with an average of five days between order and payment. The capital tied up is 1.2 million times five over 365, so roughly 16,400 euros sitting in transit at any moment. At an 8 per cent cost of capital that is about 1,300 euros a year. Real, and small.

Now non-payment. If your unpaid rate is 12 per cent, the 1.2 million euros paid came from roughly 1.36 million euros ordered, and about 164,000 euros of orders expired unpaid. That is not a fee, it is revenue that reached the last step and stopped. If a reminder before expiry converts a fifth of it, that is around 33,000 euros a year recovered, on a method that charges a fixed amount per issued transaction and therefore costs nothing extra to try. Twenty-five times the working capital figure, on the same page, and the number people negotiate is the fee.

Reviewing what this costs you

What you pay is set in your agreement, not by the scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or move straight to cutting your PSP costs, because a cheap method priced badly still costs more than it should.

Relevant markets: Japan