David Corbin · · 2 min readJapan’s Spike registers 40,000 merchants in seven months, closes in on epayment leader
Online payments is a battleground in Japan and the latest entrant is showing signs it might be on a path to winning the war. Spike, the payment solution from Metaps, announced it has exceeded 40,000 registered individual and corporate merchants.
This comes just seven months after its launch. With the jump from 30,000 to 40,000 corporate users happening over the course of October, its popularity seems to be accelerating. Incidentally, 30,000 users by the end of 2014 was the company’s initial goal.
Spike works on a freemium basis. For no cost, users can process up to US$10,000 in transactions a month. No set-up fees, monthly fees, or transaction fees. For the business premium plan, there is a US$30 monthly fee but no limit on transaction amounts and no transaction fees up to US$100,000 in sales a month. If your business is looking quite strong and netting over US$100,000, Spike takes 2.5 percent from the cost of the sale and an additional US$0.30 per transaction.
The company credits partnerships with ecommerce platform services EC Cube, Magento, and CagoLab for driving the number of users. Savvy partnerships notwithstanding, perhaps the most impressive fact about Spike’s early splash is that the service is a considerable deviation from Metaps’ core business – optimizing apps to increase downloads and in-app purchases.
40,000 is a significant number in Japanese ecommerce. Rakuten, the gold standard of ecommerce in the country, has approximately 40,000 merchants. GMO Payment Gateway, the self-styled leading payment solution, has just a tick under 50,000 clients. Spike still has a long way to go before it can really stand toe-to-toe with the traditional powers, but its growth shows that day might not be so distant.
Online payment firms outside of Japan should also take notice. The Spike website is already fully translated to English and Metaps founder and CEO, Katsuaki Sato, has said that he intends to expand the service internationally.
Metaps already generates 60 percent of its revenue outside Japan and has seven branch offices around Asia, Europe, and the US.
Editing by Steven Millward; top image by EP Technology
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