The Fintech Effect
“Creating a seamless payment service involves ironing out the irrelevant elements”, says Carolyn Breeze.
“When customers pay for products online, versus a traditional bricks and mortar store, they’re shopping mainly for convenience,” she explains.
“They want an experience that makes it easy for them to find a product they want. They want an experience that serves them with relevant content.
“They’re looking for an experience they can access that online store from a device of their choice whether that be a laptop or an iPad or an Android device or an iPhone for example and they want that experience to be consistent and easy, so they want the experience to be optimised regardless of the device they’re on.
“They don’t want to see unrelated offers and products and pop-ups and content that’s not relevant to them. And ultimately they want a frictionless checkout - being able to get in and get what they want as frictionless as possible.”
Clunky checkout procedures turn customers away and spell trouble for a business’bottom line. The average ecommerce cart abandonment rate is 69 per cent, data from Baymard Institute, an independent web usability research group, reveals.
A compilation of 37 studies found the main reasons shoppers ditched their online carts: 61 per cent of them found extra costs, such as shipping or taxes, too high. The second main reason consumers discarded their carts was because they were forced to create accounts. Complicated and lengthy checkout procedures, and the lack of visibility of their total order cost upfront frustrated customers, and many were put off by website crashes and errors.
Today’s next gen payment platforms just get it; it’s the platforms that were built with a consumer mindset, rather than a payments one that are paving the way. They use time saving technology to make checking out easier and more efficient.
One way they do this is via tokenisation, which allows businesses to store a customer’s sensitive payment information on a payment provider’s secure and Payment Card Industry (PCI)-compliant infrastructure. By replacing sensitive data with unique identification symbols, or tokens, merchants don’t need to ask for credit card information from customers at every transaction.
“Businesses need to find a partner that will work with them to help them be prepared for the future and changes in ecommerce and also help them with current challenges, like PCI compliance and making payments a frictionless in that experience on their site,” Breeze says.
“There’s a lot of online retailers and online businesses out there taking advantage of what some of the technology behind payments platforms and solutions have to offer. So the increasing conversion, tokenisation, so vaulting customer details for later, so streamlining that experience.”
Partnering with an innovative payment platform not only addresses shoppers’ need for speed and efficiency, it also solves their concerns about security. Baymard figures show 18 per cent of all cart abandonments were due to consumers simply not trusting the site with their credit card details.
Tokenisation addresses this trust issue. It ensures no sensitive information lives on a merchant’s server, which means less hacks for online stores and more confidence for shoppers. Trading tokens with a PCI-compliant payment provider also removes the burden of meeting complex PCI standards. But online businesses need to choose their payment partners carefully. Some are merely replacing old platforms with new models that are not geared for the future.
“Unfortunately people are spending a lot of time and money and effort on integration and putting in platforms which are really just replacing what they have today rather than scaling or looking for a future platforms,” Breeze says.
Selecting an innovative payment solution that is scalable powers businesses for global growth using future-proof technology. It must be backed by experts who have experience and credibility in the fintech industry, and who are on hand to provide ongoing support.
Investing in new payment technology is critical when merchants tally up their customeracquisition cost (CAC). This metric is vastly different across industries, but is calculated by dividing the number of new customers acquired by total marketing campaign costs. These costs quickly mount up and must be well spent to attract new customers.
“Whether it be that they pay for above the line marketing, whether it be they invest heavily in SEO campaigns or partnerships, there’s a lot of marketing money and planning that goes into getting people to visit a site,” she says.
“Getting them through the site and selecting product and then getting them to checkout is also a very costly experience.
“That cost of acquisition by the time the customer gets to checkout is ridiculously high. So once you get them into that cart, you don’t want to lose them.
“That’s why that friction less checkout experience is so important.”
Are your payments helping you reach new customers? Optimising your conversion at checkout? Keeping you safe? And ready for what ever’s next? Braintree does. Rethink Payments.
A catalyst for next generation commerce, Braintree’s global platform powers payments for thousands of e-commerce innovators like Airbnb, Uber, Eventbrite and Pinterest.
Merchants in more than 47 countries across the world accept payments via their app or website, in more than 130 currencies, reaching more than 200 million PayPal users, with a single integration.
To learn more, visit www.braintreepayments.com or contact us at australia@braintreepayments.com.
