LiveGamer expands its digital storefronts into Latin America

Latin America is a new hotbed for digital enterprises, and LiveGamer is making it easier for companies to take payments from this growing region.

The New York-based company has expanded its digital storefront service to support a large number of payment methods in Latin America, where the Internet-using population is growing at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world. It wants to offer best storefront and payment service for digital entertainment companies and game publishers. It enables creators of games and other programming to operate on a global basis and make money off customers in places like Latin America, where it is traditionally hard to do so, said Andrew Schneider, chief executive of LiveGamer.

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Today, the company is announcing it’s offering support for more payment methods in eight Latin American countries: Brazil, Argentina, Columbia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In these places, the most popular local payment methods do not include credit cards. Rather, Latin Americans prefer prepaid cards, bank transfers, local credit, debit cards, and mobile payments. LiveGamer offers a turnkey service that handles complex issues around cross-border payments.

The accepted forms of payments include cash-based methods such as Boleto Bancario, online bank transfers, and major credit cards through deals with local card companies. Processing transactions locally significantly improves credit-approval rates and reduces cross-border fees.

All of this makes it easy to sell items such as virtual goods in an online game, as this reduces the friction for transactions, Schneider said. And it enables game and entertainment companies to generate more revenues in some of the world’s fastest-growing markets.

“We started out in games, and now other digital entertainment services have taken off,” Schneider said. “We took the same tools that worked for game publishers and moved into digital entertainment and education, where microtransactions are taking off.”

“From our research, we know that only accepting major credit cards leaves out a revenue opportunity of 50 percent to 90 percent in an international context, and accepting major credit cards from global processors actually results in higher decline rates,” said Joost van Dreunen, the chief executive and founder of SuperData Research. “We continue to see strong growth for digital content and, consequently, a need for streamlined digital payments in South America.”

He pointed to Brazil as an example for how this is working: “By using local credit cards, content providers can increase revenue by 60 percent to 70 percent in a leading market like Brazil, where more than half of all credit cards not enabled for international payments tend to be declined.”

LiveGamer supports more than 40 payment methods in 15 Latin American countries altogether. LiveGamer provides digital commerce services to companies such as WWE, Tennis Channel, Conde Naste, and Bloomberg.