What type of payment(s) suit you best

Different vertical markets, eCommerce products and consumer demographics require different payment product sets. A key consideration to help boost conversion rates and maximize revenue, is by allowing your consumers to pay the way they want to pay, with payment products that suit your business model. Three options to offer are:

1. Appropriate Payment Options

Whatever alternative payment methods you choose, make sure that they are appropriate for your business. Consider your consumer demographic, average transaction value (ATV) and whether the nature of your business relies on one-off payments, subscriptions, or Recurring Billing/Continuous Payment Authority (CPA) payments. For subscription based businesses especially, consider tokenized recurring ‘card’ and ‘PayPal’ payments, and where available, ‘Direct Debit’ payments options.

2. Locally Appropriate Payment Options

Giving consumers the option to pay using their preferred method is a great way to significantly boost your conversions and in some markets is a critical success factor for your online business.

3. Enabling In-app payments

Take full advantage of your mobile-centric marketing strategy and allow consumers to perform payments quickly, easily and conveniently, directly from your  mobile apps.

Use a card payment mode that suits your business

Depending on your business model, you may want to authorize and capture payments immediately, wait until goods are ready for shipping before capturing payments, use card for recurring payments or returning customers, or authorize a card for later use.

Key components of our platform are:

Create order and payment in one call

Using the REST API, you get real time authorization and capture in one simple call.  Use this option when you need to capture payments immediately. Payment capture is executed in real-time.

Pre-authorization ("Authorization hold")  and Delayed Settlement

You may want to ensure that a card is valid and the funds on the consumer’s account are reserved, to authorize a value for limited free trial periods and collect when the trial period is complete.

Delayed/Partial Settlement

Assuming a successful pre-authorization, you have the ability to capture funds once (for example) a first digital content product or service is selected, or the trial period expires and the consumer decides to take advantage of a service, subscription of offer.

Zero Value/1 Unit Authorization

You may wish to ensure that a card is valid before any payment attempt is made without reserving an actual value on the consumer's account – for example, to enable a consumer to register for a free trial period, or to create a payment "token" for future  payments (see "Tokenization").

Use this feature to create tokenized consumer "card on file" accounts prior to purchase, or validate a card before a free trial period.

Tokenization

If you have consumers who are likely to generate repeat business, pay on a subscription basis, or be given the option to pay for goods or services with a single click, you can take advantage of the "tokenization" option to enable payments without a cardholder having to re-renter their card details, all in a way that minimizes your PCI compliance requirements. Use this feature to create consumer "card on file" accounts for recurring payments and potentially for ongoing variable payments (e.g. to create and capture payment opportunities for upselling).

Continuous Payment Authority/Recurring Payments

Use tokenization to make repeat captures based on securely stored card details and minimize your PCI compliance obligations. Tokenization is used to enable subscriptions and upsell opportunities.

Returning/Regular Consumers

When consumers make the decision to make repeat purchases, you want to make the experience as easy, secure and frictionless as possible. By tokenizing consumers’ card details, you can enable them to make a payment with one simple click, meaning no cumbersome or time consuming entry of card details, and a quick and frictionless payment experience. Use this feature to enable consumer-friendly, frictionless, "one click" payments for upgrades and upsells.

Best Practices

Present Payment Options in Local Currency

Offering consumers the option to pay in their own domestic currency has proven to have a very positive impact on generating new sales. Combined with local language web content, this can significantly increase international online sales.

3D Secure

Depending on the market and payment culture, 3D Secure can be a mandatory requirement; a conversion booster or a conversion killer. You can also make value judgments on when to use 3D Secure based on factors such as your average transaction value, likely consumer demographic or product or service fraud risk profile.

Managing Failed Payments

There will always be circumstances where a consumer's payment attempt fails. Do not scare them off with a red rejection message - let them know that this particular attempt was not successful and offer the option to pay with an alternative method, keeping the consumer happy and improving your chances of converting another successful sale.

Managing Consumer Drop-off

If you've captured a consumer's e-mail address, do not let them just walk away if they fail to complete the payment; they may have simply been distracted or not fully convinced about the proposition in order to make the final payment step. Send an e-mail reminder, maybe with an additional incentive, as a means to convert and finalize more sales.

Use Soft Descriptors

Prevent ‘friendly fraud’ by showing consumers an accurate description of the services supplied on their card statement (based on acquirer capabilities). Part of the automated fraud screening, is screening transactions before authorization and the implementation of fraud rules.

Consider Finance and Reconciliation

For every order, our platform will generate an Order ID to track and manage the payments end-to-end. Provide your own Merchant Reference to support effective and efficient payments tracking and reconciliation within your commerce platform, OMS and financial systems.

Get in touch with us to discuss the most appropriate options for you.