This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog and has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.
We’ve been hard at work rolling out a steady stream of new updates to the JadoPado platform.
Here are three that we’re excited about:
PayPal
We finally bit the bullet and decided that it was now or never in terms of rolling out PayPal.
While I haven’t been the best of advocates for the payment service, after multiple conversations with their Middle East team, it felt like PayPal was finally serious about the region and was keen to build a strong merchant base while aggressively growing out the consumer side of their business as well.
Many a time you’ll hear about the higher rates that PayPal charges versus a conventional merchant account and payment gateway setup. We discussed it at length, and I finally arrived at what I thought was an interesting conclusion: You’re paying PayPal higher fees to access their locked-in active customer base of 110 million.
Aside from the deeply fragmented card networks, I don’t think any other global payment provider can boast a larger customer base. At least, not yet.
The integration didn’t take us long, and given that PayPal speaks of 1 million or so accounts in the region, we expect great things. We’ve been live for a few weeks, and the initial results have been very encouraging.
JadoPado Gift Cards
This one has literally been on the cards for a while.
We re-built an existing module from scratch to allow us to offer anyone the ability to buy 100% digital gift cards that can be used on JadoPado. Pick a denomination, checkout and we’ll deliver it via email. Forward the email or print it out and hand deliver it to friends or family! Redemption is as easy as creating a JadoPado account if they don’t have one already and redeeming the gift card in their My Accounts area.
We’ve also started experimenting with using gift cards as an interesting selling tool. We’ve found that it matches up quite nicely to the “free voucher” system that millions of customers have gotten used to at both local and regional retail.
Shop And Ship
While we’ve been working with FedEx for a while, there has always been a call by customers for more shipping options. We decided that the first one that deserved attention is Aramex’s super cool, Shop And Ship service. Simply put, Shop And Ship gives a customer a shipping address in major e-commerce markets such as the US, UK, China and now the UAE, with Aramex’s eHouse in Al Quoz, Dubai.
If you’ve already got a Shop And Ship account, jump into your JadoPado account and navigate to the Integrations tab. Choose the Shop And Ship integration and we’ll have you connected up in a few minutes. We’ve got an easy guide over at our Help Centre to explain the process in more detail.
The integration simplifies the process of having your stuff delivered to Aramex’s eHouse locally and allows us to track the use of the service, while also running promotions targeted to Shop And Ship customers.
Onwards
We’ve got a ton of interesting stuff in the pipeline!
