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MotionVFX is the leading creator of plugins for Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve. With over ten years of experience and a global customer base, their plugins are used by everyone from advanced amateurs and notable YouTubers to movie makers and Hollywood studios.
In late 2020, Co-CEOs Andrzej Basiukiewicz and Wojciech Korpal took over the company with the aim of scaling the business efficiently.
Evaluating its payments infrastructure
Before moving to Paddle, MotionVFX tried different ways of managing its payments infrastructure from building in-house with payment gateways and tax solutions to merchant of record (MoR) providers.
The most recent MoR had been implemented in 2019, but as the company continued to grow at pace, it became clear it wasn’t a scalable solution for a number of reasons:
- Customer support: A 9-hour delay in support response time due to timezone constraints between MotionVFX (Poland) and its previous provider (Los Angeles).
- Payment methods: Selling to Apple software users, ApplePay is an important payment method that wasn’t supported sufficiently.
- Reporting: Extracting data and simple calculations like year-on-year growth had to be done manually, rather than through the platform dashboard.
- Checkout and conversion: Perhaps the biggest blocker, the previous checkout solution was restrictive and clunky, creating an unsatisfactory user experience that the team suspected was having a negative impact on conversion – despite more traffic reaching the website.
A new solution: Build vs buy
In looking for a new solution, Andrzej and Wojciech considered two approaches:
- Another MoR provider
- Using a payment processor and integrating with other tools to ultimately build their own billing stack.
The team weighed up the cost of the providers, with the amount of internal resource it would take to maintain them, including engineering and customer support. Wojciech says:
“We looked at payment providers but it would have been too much hassle to implement on our end and their solutions weren’t ideal for us at the time.”
Though the fees might have seemed slightly cheaper with other tools, the development team was keen not to move back to integrations with multiple tools. Andrzej explains:
“Our developers pushed for an MoR because they knew the amount of work that goes into integrating and maintaining something we build and manage in-house.”
12% increase in conversion
Prior to moving to Paddle, as the company grew and more traffic came to the MotionVFX website, the team had noticed a decline in conversion rate. The move to Paddle was part of a wider project to fix it.
MotionVFX ran an A/B test between Paddle and its existing provider to measure conversion rate at the end of the checkout process – when a customer presses “pay now”. The result – a 12% increase in favor of Paddle.
This confirmed Andrzej and Wojciech’s concerns that the user experience in their existing checkout was actually losing them business. In addition, a sub-optimal payment acceptance rate - authorization of a payment once the customer has pressed “pay now” - negatively impacted the total revenue generated by MotionVFX. In comparison, Paddle’s checkout gives much more control over purchase flow and includes a customizable inline checkout option – where previously only a full-screen overlay was available.
Since moving to Paddle, not only has the conversion rate stopped declining, it’s started to grow.
“We knew aesthetics were playing a part in that declining conversion rate but this test gave us the numbers to prove it – and real confidence in Paddle’s ability to help us stop it.”
Saving time with better reporting
Where before Andrzej had found himself calculating business growth manually himself or contacting the previous provider for support extracting data, he and the team can now access the reporting they need much more easily with Paddle – saving 3-4 hours each month.
“The Paddle dashboard is lightyears ahead of the other provider. Everything is in one place and we can get the reports we need in just a few clicks.”
Focussing on business, not payments
As an MoR Paddle takes away the burden of managing a payments infrastructure. Andrzej and Wojciech also stay in close contact with their account manager, Johan, who helps identify opportunities for further optimization to payment and billing processes.
Wojciech says: “Being able to have such an active dialogue with our account manager on Slack is a seemingly small thing but it’s very reassuring.”
Andrzej adds: “[With Paddle], we just don’t have to think about payments, invoicing, or sales tax compliance at all. They are all things that can otherwise be a blocker to growth but with Paddle taking care of it, we can focus on the business and building out new ideas.”
About MotionVFX MotionVFX is the leading creator of plugins for Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve. With over 10 years of experience in visual effects, MotionVFX provides top-quality tools for video editors and motion designers – creating innovative solutions and raising the quality levels for the industry’s standards.