Launching our Klarna Checkout integration

Introducing a smoooth integration

For the past 6 months, we have been working together with Cervera to integrate Skrym with Klarna Shipping Assistant, and today we are happy to announce that we are bringing it out from the testing phase.

The problem

Our analysis of the situation was relatively simple.

• Klarna Shipping Assistant is included for free with Klarna Checkout and actually offers sufficient functionality to cover the needs of most stores
• At the same time, using the functionality of Klarna Shipping Assistant is dependent on having a third-party system, meaning many retailers miss out on it
• None of the available solutions we saw on the market seemed to seriously prioritize enabling their users to get the most out of Klarna's relatively extensive customization options

In total, all of the above meant that solving the above problems could help improve the logistics in the Nordics as Klarna Checkout has a relatively high share of the market.

Opportunity and requirements

When we started looking into it in more detail - we came to the conclusion that there were also a lot of opportunities for synergies between Klarna and Skrym, incorporating the technology from Skrym to actually boost the capabilities of the Klarna Shipping Assistant.

View of the Klarna Shipping Assistant

In the end, these were requirements we settled on:

• Intuitive: The solution needs to enable novice users (inexperienced in either programming or logistics) to quickly learn how to achieve their goals.
• Testable: There should be no surprises - users should be able to get an immediate view of what the final result is.
• Performant: Skrym is responsible for always ensuring the shipping options are served to Klarna rapidly - regardless if external checks like postcode validations or transporter availability checks take long.

Solution

Enough background - let's have a look at what we ended up building. The chart below shows a simple overview of the integration.

In short terms, the integration does the following:

1. The retailer website loads and refreshes the Klarna Checkout widget.
2. Before displaying the shipping options, Klarna makes a request to Skrym to get the configuration of how the options should be displayed.
3. Skrym returns the configuration based on using the retailer preferences for filtering, ranking and styling of each delivery option.
4. Klarna displays the shipping options.

User interaction

So how does the user actually decide how Skrym should apply filtering, ranking and styling?

Well, for this purpose we really wanted to build something that was both intuitive and testable, and we ended up settling on developing a completely new flowchart interface that easily provides an overview of the logic that determines the user experience.

Sure, it's still a little rough in the edges, but we're making quick progress here.

Test and preview

Making it easy to overview and configure is useless if it's not easy to test and verify it behaves as expected. Our users love to tweak and tinker - and so do we. That's why we put a lot of effort into also enabling rapid and immediate preview of how it will behave.

In short, we built in a click-to-test functionality for the users to see exactly what their configuration would lead to.

Let's have a look at it!

So what do the users actually think?

During the past months, we have worked closely with Cervera to make sure we properly understand their needs and problems.

Skrym helps us make full use of the Klarna checkout and incorporates new exciting functionality like optimization, enabling us to add new carriers and more accurately display shipping options. We get happier customers and improved margins.

Patrik Gustafson, Logistics Developer at Cervera

Handling scale

It was crucial for us to build it in a way that would ensure a high-level of performance throughout the most intense periods of peak season. In this case, there was no better test for us than Black Friday.

• From 06:00 to 09:00, the increase in checkout sessions was more than 8x larger than on a normal high-season day
• There was a much clearer late-night spike in sessions

As it was our first time managing this type of request spike, we were of course a little worried about having missed anything in our preparations. Fortunately, we had not.

There were no issues or major decreases in response times. Since we let our users configure their cutoffs for how long to wait for the transporters, we were also not really impacted by the highly volatile response times from the transporters.

Future development

At Skrym, we are big believers in enabling our users to use 'what they already have'. It's the same resource efficiency mindset that we apply to everything.

Klarna Shipping Assistant has always been appreciated by consumers for its simplicity, and through the integration with Skrym we're taking a big step towards also making it easier to use for the retailers.

Oscar Bergling, Product Owner at Klarna

We look forward to continuing the good collaboration with Klarna to solve problems and make things easier for both consumers and retailers.

If you are interested in learning more about the solution, feel free to book a time to talk to us by clicking the button below.