How Aplazo doubled merchant acquisition without adding headcount

Aplazo is the leading Buy Now, Pay Later provider in Mexico. They enable consumers to split purchases into installments at the point of sale, serving merchants from local SMBs to major retailers including Walmart, Nike, American Eagle, and Sephora.

Aplazo needed a scalable way to acquire merchants, without adding headcount. And that's exactly what Maria Fernanda Castro, Merchant Operations Sr. Specialist @ Aplazo, did using Chatbase.

"Chatbase has brought us a whole new layer of organic lead acquisition. It works around the clock, qualifies merchants before a human ever gets involved, and has genuinely changed how we think about scaling merchant growth."

Merchants were dropping off before they ever got started

Aplazo's ambition is straightforward: make it possible for any merchant to sign up and start selling in under 10 minutes. The reality before Chatbase was very different. Merchant sign-ups relied on email and phone calls, the process was slow, and prospects frequently went cold mid-funnel because they did not have clear guidance on next steps.

The sales team was absorbing the cost. Routine follow-ups were eating into bandwidth that should have been spent on high-value accounts.

The challenge was scale. SMB merchants are a large part of Aplazo's growth strategy, but serving them at volume requires automation. Hiring more salespeople was not the answer.

"The cost wasn't just lost deals. It was the opportunity cost of a team that couldn't focus on strategic accounts because they were stuck managing routine SMB outreach."

An AI agent that sells, qualifies and onboards

Aplazo took a deliberate approach before committing to any tool. After evaluating their options, they concluded that AI was the right direction from the start, and Chatbase was their first and only implementation.

What sealed the decision was Chatbase's ability to handle open-ended, nuanced questions. Rule-based AI agents could not do what Aplazo needed: educate and qualify merchants in real time, in a conversation that felt natural rather than scripted.

Today, the Chatbase AI agent is embedded on Aplazo's merchant landing page and promoted via paid media. It explains the value proposition, answers FAQs, collects merchant information, and qualifies leads before routing them into the CRM. By the time a human gets involved, the merchant is already informed and committed.

"What took the most time wasn't the tool itself. It was the work we invested in building a robust knowledge base and defining an extensive training framework."

The results

• 2.2x lift in overall merchant closed-won rate. Aplazo is now closing more than twice as many merchants compared to before, driven largely by a consistent stream of organic leads coming through the AI agent.
• 50% of closed-won inbound merchants now come through Chatbase, with no additional headcount required. One in every two inbound merchants Aplazo closes today comes through an automated channel that did not exist before.
• Higher-quality merchants entering the funnel. Merchants who came through the AI agent were noticeably more informed and more committed than those arriving through traditional channels. By the time a salesperson picked up the conversation, the merchant had already self-selected, learned the value proposition, and shared key qualifying information. The AI agent did not just generate more leads, it generated better ones.
• Performance improved month over month. Consistent weekly fine-tuning based on real conversation patterns meant results kept getting better.
• The sales team freed up for high-value work. Human intervention is now reserved for complex questions, high-value opportunities, or merchants who explicitly ask to speak with someone.

What's next

Aplazo sees the current deployment as just the beginning. Having proven Chatbase as an acquisition tool, they are actively exploring how to expand its role deeper into the merchant lifecycle, particularly around onboarding and registration flows beyond initial sign-up.

"Just try it. Chatbase is a very friendly, non-technical platform that is easy to set up and can start working on your leads 24/7 from day one. You don't need a big team or a complex integration to get real results."