Boosting online sales in peak season

Look beyond the peak season buzzwords – and it’s mostly style over substance. Tips and tricks in a listicle usually aren’t enough to improve your customer journey or conversion rates. Why?

There are three main reasons: They’re either not very insightful; too generic to be helpful; or regard conversion optimisation as a one-off activity. In this article, we consider how e-commerce businesses can work with their payment partners to convert browsers into buyers all year long.

According to a recent FedEx report, global cross-border e-commerce sales are forecast to grow by 26% by 2030.

International customers are becoming increasingly important to online sellers. However, although there are multiple ways to transact internationally, local markets are often dominated by local payment methods and preferences. So much so that if your business only accepts Visa and Mastercard online, you could be turning away as much as three-quarters of business.

For example, more than 70% of all e-commerce transactions today in the Netherlands are made with iDEAL, a bank transfer method. In Germany, credit cards are in distant fourth place for e-commerce payments (11%), behind PayPal (28%), payment on invoice (27%) and direct debit (17%).

Meanwhile, Poles prefer to use bank transfers (67%) and pay for only 15% of online purchases using credit cards.

Depending on your market segment, this may include anything from bank transfers to Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) to digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay and strictly regional payment methods such as Blik (Poland) or EPS (Austria).

As you can see, it is important to make sure your payments partner offers the alternative payment methods you need to connect with your audience. But even then, no checkout is immune to failure, and it is not uncommon that payments don’t go through the first time. You need a solid backup plan.

Consumers are quick to abandon their carts if they encounter errors or delays at checkout. Indeed, data from IMRG’s network of retailers reveals that customers who abandon the checkout process typically do so after spending about 90% of the time it takes to complete an average checkout. This abandonment pattern underscores a need for optimised checkout processes to retain potential buyers. An additional drawback is if they have a bad experience, customers are also less likely to return, damaging future sales.

There may be any number of reasons for a failed payment: connectivity errors, time-outs, insufficient customer funds, or extra authentication requests.

Ecommpay solves this by offering a ‘try again’ feature that online sellers can integrate seamlessly on their payment page. It works like a safety net for declined payments, allowing customers to switch between different payment methods within the same payment attempt.

Merchants who’ve rolled out the feature report higher approval rates as well as improved checkout experience. Additionally, it helps significantly reduce inbound customer support enquiries. By achieving more with less, you can strike a balance between improving the buyer journey and driving conversions – something that is equally important when it comes to fraud prevention.

Festive and sales seasons are peak times not only for e-tailers and shoppers, but for fraudsters too. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre is warning shoppers to be vigilant after more than £11 million was lost to cyber criminals during last year’s festive shopping period, with clothing, high-end tech products and cars among the most common products cited.

Each business will experience this differently and may have its own fraud spikes throughout the year. So, we strongly suggest that you discuss with your provider how they can best tailor their solution’s security parameters to meet your business needs.

The best anti-fraud solutions utilise a stack of technologies, combining traditional rules-based and AI-powered models, which get smarter over time and with more data. However, no matter how smart the technology is, human involvement is still a critical factor. A dedicated anti-fraud manager can add expert insight and round-the-clock support to already powerful machine capabilities.

Ecommpay offers 60+ anti-fraud filters for businesses to customise, depending on their limits, restrictions and scenarios. Our know-how in automated and manual fraud monitoring allows us to reach a fraud-to-sales ratio of 0.2%.

Ask your provider how their fraud prevention system is built. Those built in-house will likely be quicker and easier to tailor to your exact business specifics. At the same time, full control of the development cycle allows in-house solutions to be more responsive to emerging fraud types or volume spikes. This is also of high relevance for resilience and reliability.

Your ability to accept payments is more than just a matter of getting customers to checkout and providing the right payment methods. Peak season or not, a big part of your success has to do with your provider’s server infrastructure resilience and availability.

Ideally, payment providers should operate across multiple data centres and offer full redundancy, AKA having a backup for every key node of the system. Their infrastructure should be optimised for both high load and scalability.

Ecommpay’s fault-tolerant system is rated 0.9999, with no more than an hour of downtime per year. Our processing capacity is deployed across multiple data centres, ensuring they are geographically close to our customers. This boosts network speed by 15%, vital all year round, not just during peak season. We guarantee structural resilience by ensuring there is no single point of failure, and systems run on infrastructure that allows fully asynchronous request processing and can auto-scale up to 5x its total capacity.

As a rule, a payment solution’s effectiveness increases when it is integrated into a unified service ecosystem. This not only enables a more seamless payment experience, but also a more secure one, as it prevents suspicious transactions from falling between the gaps of fragmented systems.

Under the bonnet, when services are designed and built in-house, developers have full control over the improvement of the system. Without having to rely on a 3rd party, the system’s agility, cost, and speed-to-market improve dramatically, further facilitating continuous innovation.

Rolling out new features and technologies becomes a matter of internal strategy, as well as responding to the current market demand and feedback from customers.

With a more seamless payment journey, tighter security protocols and more dependable performance, merchants are set to weather high sales seasons, as well as drive conversions continuously.

Conversion optimisation and capacity planning is a continuous process. It never formally starts or ends. Peak season is a walk in the park for those who work towards this goal all year round.

Make sure your payment service provider covers all the areas discussed here – local payment methods, payment retry logic, fraud monitoring, payment infrastructure resilience and a unified service ecosystem.

A good payment provider will work with customers throughout the year, keeping them updated on changes and preempting problems. This helps resolve issues fast, unlock maximum value and ensure your business always performs at its peak.