Today’s hyperconnected consumer is constantly looking for ‘no-fuss’ ways to conduct their business, and this couldn’t be truer than in the case of online shopping. A post-pandemic world demands contactless, secure, and one-touch payments. This makes it important for any business to pay more attention to creating an intuitive payment experience that performs as well as delights.
Visual Appeal
Designing an intuitive payment experience that is visually appealing, communicates clearly, and is easily interpretable is essential to the success of a checkout process. Cluttered, counterintuitive design often hampers and frustrates customers, leading them to abandon their carts. By creating easy-to-read layouts and limiting the amount of information that customers have to fill out increases the chances of them actually going through with the transaction.
Intuitive form filling using the auto-complete feature can guide customers on which fields they need to fill and which they don’t. Payment forms can also be optimized using clickable images, which tend to be more engaging than text, so that users can fill out all necessary details without leaving out important information. These ensure lesser mistakes, lower cart abandonment risk, and successful checkout on the first try.
Through all aspects of the visual design, the idea is to have a clear call to action so that users know where to click. Having clear information on pricing such as displaying the final price throughout the entire checkout process is also important to prevent payment declines.
Functionality & Flexibility
Functionality and flexibility are both critical pillars in the payment experience. Consumers today are looking for personalized and multichannel approach that work seamlessly across devices (desktop, mobile, app etc.). They also prefer to make purchases in their local currency and/or language. Thus, offering them the option of multi-platform payments in their local currencies and languages makes customers comfortable in making transactions. This in turn significantly increases the payment acceptance and conversion rate, thereby driving sales.
Another popular feature is one-click payments, which makes the purchase and paying process much faster and easier. When customers feed their personal details into the system, the information is saved and is automatically applied every time they make purchases in the future. This reduces hassle and boosts the payment acceptance rates.
Research also indicates that consumers also prefer faster loading and response time (under 1 s) of the payment page. Optimizing the checkout performance and avoiding unnecessary details and re-routing will improve page response times, leading to higher payment success.
Security
In times when more people are transacting online, fraud is also on the rise. Hence, every payment process should have airtight security settings to prevent unauthorised access. Two-factor authentication such as 3D Secure which authenticates cardholders online through a secret code, is popular amongst merchants. But some customers might find 3D Secure to be too invasive and cumbersome, and abandon their carts. That is why customizing the application to implement a non-invasive version of 3D Secure would be a good way to avoid any negative impact your payment acceptance rates.
Tokenization is another way to bring in extra layers of security to the payment process. Tokens are unique identifiers associated with customer payment data such as card details, which prevent fraudsters from using stolen customer data to make online purchases. Hence, choose a payment services provider whose merchant account and payment solution uses tokenization.
Additionally, analysis of current and historical decline data can help merchants to optimize their security and risk management tools for accepting valid transactions, thus boosting payment acceptance rates.
Finally. Choosing the right payment service provider can make a big difference to merchants, particularly those selling in international markets, in boosting their payment acceptance rates. From offering great design and UX to supporting multi-currency payments and other popular payment modes like credit cards, digital wallets, etc. The right partner can also provide indispensable insights into the local payment preferences.
Antony Robinson is an experienced IT expert, information architect and a customer experience evangelist. He has over 30 years of experience in web technologies, user experience, media, and marketing. Antony is currently the CMO of Novalnet AG, a fintech company in Germany. As CMO, he leads the company’s marketing strategy and fosters collaborations. Antony’s expertise and dedication to technology and innovation make him a valuable leader in his field.