Conversion in the payment chain

The payment step is the narrowest and final part of your sales funnel. Having the right payment setup is key to your customer’s buyer experience and will directly affect your conversion and business success. In this video, Robin Soubry, our Head of Customer Experience, will give you an overview of the payment flow and share tips on how you can improve your conversion.

Transcript: Most e-commerce businesses invest a lot in digital marketing and use A/B testing too tools to optimise their website experience in conversion, but many overlook the payment step in their checkout process.
Why would you? once you click on the pay button, the revenue secured right?
Not really! In practise 20% of transactions never reach the completion step, that’s one in five transactions!
Just think about the wasted advertising euro’s or how much you could have grown your business with that money.
My name is Robin from Ingenico ePayments. In this video I will give you more insights on how the payment ecosystem works. And for each step, I will share some practical tips that you can implement to improve your payment process.
Specifically, you’ll learn about payment flow.
1. The payment page and what you can do to provide a good shopper conversion.
2. The user authentication and what you can do to provide a smooth experience while reducing fraud. And
3. The transaction authorisation and what makes the differences between the acquirers.
A visitor from your website can have a genuine interest to buy your products but still abandon the payment page for several reasons. They might simply have changed their mind but in fact there’s a lot going on the payment page, small details that can make or break your conversion. What are these small details? Let’s have a look.
1. Ensuring localization of your payment methods, currencies, and languages that your customer expects.
2. Build trust and confidence when your customers use your payment page. A professional design that reflects your company’s brand with consistent styling and your company logo. Also, visual elements of security will provide more trust.
3. With a third of online customers opting to make purchases online with smartphone, make sure your payment page is mobile responsive and show the correct type of keyboard for each interaction on the payment page.
In the authentication step a user is verified on their identity to make sure that they have the right to do the transaction and prevent Fraud.
The authentication landscape is evolving a lot, with PSD2, strongest authentication entering into force for all European transactions by the end of the year.
With PSD two the issuing bank can challenge transactions. It means it as a merchant, if you don’t have 3D secure activated then your valid transactions may be declined.
So, here’s what’s important to you.
1. Make sure you’ve activated 3D-secure for your account otherwise transactions may get blocked automatically.
Secondly, provide additional data to the PSP to improve your chances to get exemptions.
For example, additional data such as consumer, browser or shipping information will be passed on to the issuing bank. It will give them more confidence in removing the additional authentication steps and reduce friction.
Finally let’s look at the authorization phase. Most of the things here happened behind the scenes with many parties involved.
The difference in acquiring acceptance rates comes down to two main areas,
1. The technical setup of the acquirer, and
2. The partnership management of the acquiring teams.
Transaction can be blocked due to technical reasons such as the uptime of the acquiring engine itself or the connexions to the rest of the value chain.

Next to careful release management, an acquirer can implement backend mechanisms such as routing or fall-back mechanism.
more important even is to actively look in depth at the declined transactions and take action on the root causes.

For example, some issuers decline cross-border transactions or non-3D secured transactions for certain card types.
By actively managing their payment partners such as Issuers, Schemes and PSPs, acquirers can make big differences.
Ultimately as a merchant you want to get insights in your own transaction data so you can take action on declined transactions and optimise your business.
So today we went through the life cycle of a transaction and highlighted some areas where you can make an impact in your conversion.
1. The payment page were small differences can make a big impact.
2. The authentication and which actions you can take. And
3. The authorisation and what drive the differences between acquiring acceptance rates.
You will find deeper conversations on these topics in our payment performance video series.
Like always if you have any questions feel free to contact us, we are here for you.