How to optimise your online checkout, one marginal gain at a time

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Your online checkout is an opportunity to give customers what they want, there and then. You’ve done the hard work by attracting them to your site and convincing them to hit the big ‘buy’ button. So it’s crucial not to fall at the final hurdle.

The ability to accept, process, protect, and recover payments are four things every business should have top of mind. By optimising the payments set up, businesses can increase conversion rates, reduce fraud and boost revenue with a few key adjustments.

The Adyen Marginal Gains guide provides a deep-dive into four payments-focused areas or keep reading for the summary.

  1. Accepting payments

Achieving the highest possible percentage of payments and keeping authorisation rates high should be the goal for all retailers. So it’s important that you’re offering relevant payment methods across all markets. Credit cards, for example, are not the preferred payment method across Europe.

Another important factor is authentication. Card-Not-Present (CNP) fraud represents approximately 85 per cent of all card fraud in Australian-issued cards. To help mitigate CNP fraud and make online payments more secure, tools such as 3D Secure 2 (3DS2) have been introduced to improve authentication. It also makes the authentication process more optimal for customers. 

  1. Processing payments

Now we come to the actual processing part of the journey. Here are some effective ways to boost your processing using proven tools:

  1. Local acquiring – find yourself a payments partner with local acquiring licenses for all the markets in which you operate. Not only will it create efficiencies, but it can help reduce costs and increase authorisation rates.
  2. Network Tokens – Adyen data shows that 10 per cent of cards are refused because of card expiry, or by being lost or stolen. Network Tokens address this issue. They are secure card tokens which replace the card number (PAN) for payments, giving customers uninterrupted service even when their payment details expire.
  3. Smart Payment Messaging – Issuers approve or decline a payment based on the data contained in payment messages. Tools such as Smart Payment Messaging means the format of payment messages are adapted to suit an issuing bank’s preferences, increasing the likelihood of the payment being accepted.

3. Protecting shoppers

Many payment providers prioritise security ahead of customer experience, by applying a less-than-perfect, slowed-down approach to combat fraud, blocking payments at the slightest sniff of inconsistency. 

Our view? There’s no such thing as a silver bullet. We believe the best way to protect shoppers is by combining different techniques to make optimal decisions using risk management tools and implementing advanced algorithms and shopper recognition to get the best authorisation rates. 

Our guide provides five key components to optimise security and protect shoppers without trading off on customer experience. 

4. Recovering payments

It’s important to understand why payments get declined, how to recover them, and some of the products available to help.

Recovering declined payments (due to insufficient funds, technical reasons or wrongly formatted messaging) doesn’t needn’t be a manual process. Working with the right payments provider, payments can be retried where there is a technical error. The retries are attempted immediately after the first decline, meaning shoppers don’t need to re-enter their details.

Secondly, you could attempt to recover declined payments through automated, intelligent retries at a later time or date when shoppers are most likely to have money in their bank account.

Ready to make some marginal gains?

We hope this article has given you some guidance on what to consider. 

Want to learn more on how to stack marginal gains for long-term cumulative impact through payments? Contact us today.