Payment Conversions - A Quick Guide to Increase Them

The conversion rate equals the success of your business. We’ll review the reasons why they can be low, and explain how you can fix that issue with card transactions and other payment methods.

It’s Pay Time

So, you’ve done the hard setup part: people are coming to your website, browse the goods you offer and even click the Buy button, and then… nothing happens!

Somehow, they abandon their carts and never complete the purchase. Why is this happening? How can you tackle that problem and minimize its risk of occurrence?

Meet the conversion rate. This smart marketing term means a number of purchase attempts that are successfully finalized.

Sometimes this rate is high. Sometimes it has peaks and dips. And sometimes it’s unmercifully low. What could be the possible reason behind the low payment conversions?

Based on statistics, one of the most common reasons why the payment conversion rate, or approval ratio, suffers is that the customers refuse to seal the deal and don’t make a purchase at the last moment. There’s one of the possible explanations for that: awkward payment process.

Abandonment Issues

According to Baymard Institute, 18% of the US online shoppers give up on purchasing because the checkout process was too long, complicated and byzantine. And as the same research reports, 7% of them didn’t find payment methods that would suit them.

Based on this data, we can actually look inside the customer’s mind, understand what brings value to a client’s shopping experience, and improve the conversion rate.

Here are some of the primary reasons why your approval ratio may be in decline:

• It takes too long. It can sound prosaic, but based on consumer behavior analysis findings, this is the main reason why people refuse to finish the checkout and the conversion rate drops. The mentioned Baymard’s research testifies that every 5th shopper abandons the cart because of the “too long / complicated checkout process”.
• Poor design of a payment form. Strangely, some online merchants ignore both visual aesthetics and usability of their payment page. It can be overloaded with unnecessary bells and whistles, drastically contrast with the rest of the website, feel unintuitive for the customer, and so on.
• Suspicion. This issue appears when the webpage redirecting comes into play. The fact that they are sent to a third-party page may scare some customers away, as they know that such steps are often followed by common threats as phishing and other fraud methods afflict the cyberspace.
• Insufficient technical stability. Despite meticulous quality assurance, banking online systems don’t have the means to be 100% protected from glitches, bugs or even fraud and cyberattacks. If a system of a certain bank fails, your customers won’t be able to conduct payments with either of the available methods even if they really want to.
• Too much effort. Nobody likes fiddling with the credit card credentials more than once. If your system forces customers to take extra steps and re-enter them over and over to complete payments, they’ll eventually look for another venue.
• Limited options. This applies to e-shops that work with foreigners, among all else. Your conversion rate can drop due to limited payment method acceptance. Customers from other countries may prefer other e-payment systems to the standard Visa. Brazilian Boleto or Norwegian Vipps are quite popular in their homelands, so you need to provide the payment methods that are widely used in a certain region as well.

These are the main risk factors that can and will impact your online acceptance of card transactions and other payment methods negatively. But don’t worry: there are effective remedies to treat these problems as well.

Innovate = High Conversion Rate

So, how can we increase the conversion among customers who wish to conduct purchases using credit card transactions and other common payment methods? Is there an antidote to a customer quitting the checkout? Luckily, there is — a ready-made payment gateway instantly reduces most of the pains we listed above and gets you higher conversions.

Here’s what it can offer for your business:

• Simplicity. It provides intuitive and quick checkout, which won’t make your customer lose their patience.
• Customization. You will preserve your brand’s integrity with the design customization options, while keeping your payment page nice and clean.
• Recurring bills. Customers won’t have to fiddle with multiple steps of filling in card credentials whenever they want to buy something from you again. Tokenization allows recurring billing, so they will simply need to click/tap the Buy button to complete payments within a second.
• Cross-platform support. If the payment page isn’t optimized for mobile properly, it will force the buyer to quit the checkout immediately. Shopify reports that 86% of mobile users abandon their e-carts. This means that users’ inconvenience is one of the main reasons why it happens. Plus, share of online payments will keep growing in the future.
• Multi-currency support. Your customers can use British pounds, euros or yen as their currency of choice. The payment gateway provides real-time currency conversion, which enables customers from all over the world to shop at your place and, consequently, boosts conversion.
• Payment methods variety. Such a gateway can detect the consumer’s country/region and offer a relatable payment method. If you count on the foreign clientele who may not have Visa, Payoneer or Skrill, then this feature is unskippable.
• Fraud risk management. An out-of-box payment gateway is in compliance with numerous standards, including PCI DSS, SSL, KYC, and others. Plus, it provides its own anti-fraud security steps, which keeps fraudsters at bay, without hurting a customer’s shopping. These features prevent money theft, cardholder’s data leakage, false chargebacks and other threats associated with payments.
• Multi-acquiring. This feature connects your venue to multiple payment acquirers, while most other businesses are in partnership with just one. It helps to make payments quicker, validate payments if the primary acquiring bank has technical issues, and also provides more autonomy to your brand.
• 24/7 online. Your venue will be able to accept payments night and day. Even if your bank’s functionality will fail, it won’t disrupt the payment acceptance at your shop and affect the conversion rate due to multi-acquiring.

All these features are crucial for successful ecommerce payment processing. It’s quite likely that the only thing that your business lacks to have a flood of finalized purchases is this functionality list. We know the right method to improve your conversion rate.

So, don’t waste any time, and upgrade your business to the next level of convenience and security. The customers’ loyalty won’t be long in coming.