This article is part of a series of case studies by Buddy about the insurance carrier of the future, Interplanetary Insurance, and how they use different e-commerce best practices to protect the future of humanity.
Insurance is hard. Selling insurance online? Even harder.
Interplanetary Insurance knew they had a great product. Airlock Accident Insurance is a no-brainer for anyone stepping into the vacuum of space. A minor seal failure, a bad docking procedure, or just one too many "hold my oxygen tank" moments, and suddenly, you’ve got a very expensive problem.
But building a direct-to-consumer (D2C) insurance experience that felt as intuitive as shopping on Earth? That was the real challenge.
The Problem: Consumers Want Simple, Insurers Get Complexity
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Insurance buyers expect a seamless, self-contained checkout. They want to quote, bind, and buy without getting kicked to a separate portal, redirected three times, or (worst case) forced to pick up the phone.
Why? Because everything else they buy online works that way.
Customers don’t want to feel like buying insurance is fundamentally different from booking a flight, ordering groceries, or subscribing to a streaming service. But many insurers still rely on outdated, fragmented systems where quoting happens in one place, payments in another, and policy issuance in yet another—each adding friction that destroys conversion rates.
The Reality of Building E-Commerce for Insurance
It’s not that insurers don’t want a clean, modern checkout flow. It’s that getting there is a massive, often expensive, and always time-consuming lift.
To fully support D2C insurance sales, insurers typically have to build out:
- A smooth front-end experience that doesn’t feel like a government form from 1984.
- A compliant checkout flow that integrates directly into the core experience.
- A rating engine that handles pricing in real-time (milliseconds, not seconds).
- A policy issuance system that generates documents and delivers them instantly.
That’s a huge investment—both in engineering resources and time-to-market. Some insurers spend over a year trying to build their own D2C checkout experience, only to end up with something that still doesn’t feel intuitive or modern to the end user.
Interplanetary Insurance wasn’t interested in spending years re-engineering something that should already exist.
The Solution: A Fully Integrated Checkout—No Extra Hassle
Instead of stitching together multiple vendors or building from scratch, Interplanetary Insurance partnered with Buddy.
This meant:
- No third-party redirects → Customers stay on the Interplanetary Insurance site.
- No engineering backlog → No custom infrastructure to maintain or new architecture to deploy.
- No friction → Just a modern experience with instant checkout that makes buying insurance feel as natural as adding something to a cart.
Why It Matters: The Shift in Insurance Buying Behavior
Selling insurance isn’t just about risk anymore. It’s about experience. The brands that insurers have built over the past two decades of animal avatars and clever ad spots are just the top of the funnel. Without a seamless capture experience, these efforts are leaving a ton of written premium on the table.
Today’s buyers expect coverage options to be accessible, instant, and transparent. This isn’t unique to space insurance; it’s happening across the entire industry:
- A study by Sure found that 64% of Digital Natives (born in 1975 or after) believe insurance should be predominantly purchased and managed online. (reference)
- McKinsey highlights that consumers expect a seamless, digitally enhanced experience across multiple access points and channels. A fragmented customer journey can lead to dissatisfaction and increased drop-off rates. (reference)
- If the insurance product is offered as an add-on at the checkout, that conversion rate instantly rises to between 20-50% (reference)
Interplanetary Insurance recognized that a great product isn’t enough—it has to be easy to buy, easy to understand, and instantly delivered.
The Results: Faster, Smoother, and Scalable
Since launching with Buddy, Interplanetary Insurance has seen:
✅ Higher conversion rates → Fewer drop-offs, more policies sold.
✅ Lower friction → No more juggling multiple vendors to make the checkout flow work.
✅ Scalability → The same system works whether they sell ten policies or ten thousand.
Bringing Insurance E-Commerce to Life
Selling insurance shouldn’t feel like filing a tax return. It should be as smooth and seamless as any other online purchase. By embedding a fully functional, end-to-end checkout inside their own site, Interplanetary Insurance modernized their customer experience—without spending years building it themselves.
And in space, time matters. Because no one wants to wait for a quote while their oxygen countdown timer is running.
