How to Delight Your Online Customers with a Great Payment Experience

Getting the customer journey and experience right is central to developing trusting relationships with your consumers. Many businesses focus on areas like website copy, product descriptions, how your visitor moves through an eCommerce store, and customer communications—while all these factors are important, there’s another that’s often overlooked: The payment experience.

The payment experience is one of the last interactions that your customer will have with your eCommerce website. Get the payment experience right, and they’ll leave knowing they’ve made a good purchase. Get it wrong, and they will likely leave before completing the transaction, sending them into the arms of a competitor.

You don’t want that to happen, and neither do we. Read on to find out how you can remove friction from the online payment process, use payment technology to make customers happy, and balance speed with security.

Where eCommerce Payment Friction Comes From

Before we get into improving the payment experience, it’s worth exploring how it can go wrong and create friction. 

Think about the customer journey once a consumer visits your online store—they will:

1. Browse your product options and listings
2. Read product descriptions
3. Choose the product that’s right for them
4. Add it to their cart
5. Pay for the product

All of the friction around payments happens in step five. Let’s look at some of the problems your customer could face:

• They don’t have the right payment method. They may want to pay with their mobile wallet but you only accept credit and debit card payments.
• Payment processing is not optimized for their mobile device, so it’s difficult to see where to enter information.
• Payment processing takes a long time, and they shouldn’t have to wait for it. 
• You require significant security information from them that they don’t have.
• Your fraud detection and approval rules are extremely sensitive, meaning their legitimate payment is declined. 

Enhancing your Payment Technology for a Better Customer Experience

You can resolve each of these problems through making changes to your payment stack, payment technology, integrations, and payment software settings. Let’s dig into the things you can do right now to ensure a better customer payment experience.

Allow Customers to Pay However They Want

The days of your online customers just using credit or debit cards are behind us. Increasingly, consumers are choosing other payment methods like mobile wallets, cryptocurrencies, or bank transfers. If you want to deliver a great payment experience, you need to let your customers pay through any payment technology:

• Future-proof your payments by offering multiple, diverse payment options to customers.
• Get multiple payment processors in place through your payment stack to support all methods of payment.
• Integrate with popular mobile wallets and other payment services like Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Samsung Pay, etc.

Ensure Online Payments are Flawless Across All Devices

Customers are increasingly moving to shopping on their smartphones and tablets. Make sure that your shopping cart and payment software works beautifully across every device:

• Look for payment software that integrates with payment options stored on the customer's device.
• Test your shopping cart and payment processing across multiple device types and configurations.

Balance eCommerce Payment Speed and Security

Although your customers want to check out fast, we’re all becoming increasingly aware of the need for online payment security. Card and payment fraud are a major issue, and most consumers appreciate the addition of a little more security into the checkout process. The trick is to balance security with convenience, so you don’t get too many shopping cart abandonments, and still meet your revenue targets:

• Look into incorporating established security approaches like Visa Checkout, Verified by Visa, MasterCard SecureCode, and others.
• Use your payment stack to integrate with good fraud detection software that can adapt and accept or decline payment methods based on multiple criteria. 
• Educate customers about the need for enhanced security for their protection.

Route Online Payments Efficiently for Fast Processing

Most large online businesses will use multiple payment processors to manage customer payments. You might choose to use a different processor depending on how you’re being paid, the volume of transactions, or the amount you’re being charged for processing. From a customer’s perspective, they want processing to be fast and transparent:

• Review each of your payment processors for speed of processing, and choose those with the lowest latency.
• Continually monitor your payment stack and if you notice slowdowns and bottlenecks, then understand and resolve the underlying problem.

Reduce False Declines in Your Fraud Checking Processes

False declines are like kryptonite to customers. False declines happen when a legitimate consumer’s payment is rejected, due to issues identified by your fraud detection software, or authorizations and approvals carried out by third parties. You want to reduce false declines as much as possible, while still giving yourself adequate fraud protection against genuine criminals:

• Review your fraud detection and prevention rules on a regular basis to see if declines are within acceptable industry limits.
• If you experience false declines, understand the rules that may have led to them and tweak them so they balance payment acceptance with proper fraud protection.
• Try different fraud detection and prevention tools until you find a balance that works for you and your customers.

The very best payment experience is one that’s almost invisible to the person making the payment. You’ll want to review every part of the payment journey from the customer’s perspective, looking at all the variations and what could go wrong. Once you’ve completed an audit of the customer payment journey, you can dig into the payment technology behind any issues. As you fix underlying problems, continue monitoring how your payment processing is working, and take action if you’re seeing too many cart abandonments and failed payments.

The process of measure, improve, control will help you to continually improve both the customer journey and the payment process, boosting business revenue and consumer trust.