Enhancing User Experience Doubled Revenue YoY

Paymentez processes payments for online games, websites, and mobile apps.

The company is connected with local credit card acquirers — banks that process and settle credit card transactions — in six countries, and offers a comprehensive local payment platform for customers.

Formerly known as Mentez, the company was founded in 2007. In its early stages, Mentez hosted games like Buddy Poke and Colheita Feliz on the Brazilian social network Orkut. Soon after the company’s launch, 42 million of the 45 million Orkut users were playing Mentez’s games.

The company wanted a solution that would allow users to provide payments conveniently, so they partnered with SEBRAE, a Brazilian autonomous social institution whose aim is to foster the development of micro and small enterprises.

The collaboration enabled Paymentez to create a proof of concept (POC) for a Reseller Program in which they established a new payment solution, and leveraged local LAN houses and gaming centers. With the POC in place, LAN houses were able to buy game credits from Paymentez and resell the credits to users who could pay in cash.

Mentez tested their POC in 85 LAN gaming centers over the course of three months, and found that due to the buying preferences of their core user base the number of paying users grew significantly.

The team had uncovered a lucrative opportunity to expand the business, but their POC platform provided an unoptimized experience for users. There was still work to be done, but the company was moving in the right direction.

Despite crafting a solution that enabled their core user base to conveniently access their games, to succeed at being an omnichannel business Paymentez needed to evolve their monetization practice to fit the needs of all their users — resellers, players, and game producers.

The team at Koombea understood that for Paymentez to achieve their goal of becoming an omnichannel business, they would require a tool with the right architecture and analytics capabilities that would enable them to go beyond simply facilitating payment collection.

Instead, the company needed a responsive web application that possessed the controls necessary to provide them with access to KPIs such as Average Order Value, Customer Lifetime Value, and New vs. Repeat Customer Ratios.

Developing a solution that would align with, and directly support the company’s enterprise architecture and business strategy would allow for streamlined processes and increased revenue across the business.

Since partnering with Koombea, Paymentez is now powered by a secure payment processing gateway that provides customized experiences for all of its users.

The application’s architecture has been completely redesigned and developed in Ruby on Rails. Everything about the new architecture focuses on optimized experiences for each use case. Plus, with Ruby on Rails Paymentez is able to build and evolve on their platform much faster than in the past when they were limited to the rigidness of Javascript and PHP.

The company’s current electronic payment gateway has:

The company’s business has grown significantly since implementing their new electronic payment gateway:

Miguel Ramirez credits the new solution’s streamlined UX for much of the company’s success:

The current payment gateway also enables the company to remain an industry leader, as Ramirez’s team is able to bring cutting-edge features to market quickly and effectively.

“We needed to be able to move fast in order to seize the opportunity of establishing our Reseller Program,” explains Ramirez. “Our new solution is so easy to manage and build upon. In just one year we went from working with 85 resellers to 4,700, which left little time for our competitors to capitalize on the same opportunity.”

When asked if he was satisfied with the end result after partnering with Koombea, Ramirez stated the following:

“I can’t recommend Koombea enough! They gave us a 360° solution while at the same time helping us with everything from business strategy and technology, to the UX of our application. They are great people that do fantastic work.”