Today Stripe announced they have plans to introduce embeddable shopping carts.
A few weeks ago they announced embeddable customer portals and embeddable pricing cards.
Stripe, the payment processor that most online businesses use to take payments, seems to be eating up the online payment world.
If your business uses Stripe API to facilitate payments, you need to be extremely paranoid.
Because the truth is Stripe, which essentially has endless amounts of capital, can create and integrate any feature they’d like and put you out of business.
But it’s not just Stripe doing this, Shopify for example released Shop Pay which essentially destroyed one-click checkout businesses overnight.
HubSpot, which is a vital part of my business, released HubSpot payments.
HubSpot wants a piece of the payment pie and who could blame them?
It makes sense for them to want to release payments since they want to be the one-stop-shop CRM solution. I would be lying if this doesn’t concern me.
This is why I’ve been thinking non-stop about how Cartfuel can play defense against these billion-dollar companies. I need to go where they are not going and be vigilant in how I support our customers. Otherwise, Cartfuel could die. This is even more true if your business runs on another business’s API… as mine does.
One way to achieve defensibility is to focus on areas that the larger companies are not focusing on. This will allow you to differentiate your business and provide value to your customers that the larger companies cannot provide.
This can be introducing features that are super unique to a small subset of customers or focusing on a very niche market.
Another way to achieve this is to build a community around your product, this way even if a large company does enter your market, your customers will be less likely to leave because of the strong relationships they have formed within your community.
This is something that we haven’t done enough of at Cartfuel, but that will change soon.
The last way to achieve this is by providing an exceptional customer service experience. This is something that I am very passionate about and have built my business on.
No matter what, you need to have a plan for how you will defend your business against large companies with seemingly endless amounts of capital and resources. Otherwise, you will be at their mercy.