The Internet is filled with clickbaity advice about boosting e-commerce sales during high season, be it Summer Sale, Back-to-School Season, or Black Friday / Cyber Monday. You know the drill. It’s about being flexible and mobile-friendly. Optimise your offering and campaigns. Plan and stay positive. Problem is – conversion optimisation is a continuous year-round process, not a one-off fix in the run-up to peak season, as we explain.
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?
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 reliably all year long.
Welcome international customers
Global e-commerce sales are forecast to grow 13% by 2030. That’s according to a FedEx report. But global cross-border e-commerce sales are forecast to grow by 26%. That’s double the growth over the same period.
International customers are becoming increasingly important to online sellers. However, even though 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 in some countries.
For example, 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 (12%), behind PayPal (30%), payment on invoice (24%) and direct debit (21%). Meanwhile, Poles prefer to use bank transfers (67%) and pay for only 15% of online purchases using credit cards.
Offering a mix of familiar local payment methods at checkout shows you’re open to business from customers, wherever they are in the world.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 on to strictly regional payment methods such as GCash or Boleto Bancário.
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 back-up plan.
Finetune payment retry logic
Consumers are quick to abandon their carts if they encounter errors or delays at checkout. 70% of online shoppers don’t complete their purchases – that’s an average! Some studies put cart abandonment higher at 80%. Others – lower at 55%. 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, extra authentication requests.
It makes no sense to turn away customers who are determined to buy from you, and your payments partner has to anticipate this by implementing effective payment retry logic.
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 helping you achieve more with less, this strikes a balance between improving buyer journey and driving conversions – a balance that is equally important when it comes to fraud prevention.
Ensure rock-solid 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 £10 million was lost to cybercriminals during last year’s festive season.
While fraud losses grab the headlines during peak season, proactively tackling fraud is a year-round endeavour.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, 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.
Pay special attention to resilience and reliability
Your ability to accept payments is not 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. have a back-up for every key node of the system. Their infrastructure should be optimised for both high load and scalability.
How your partner’s systems are built will determine how well they cope with the peaks and troughs of your sales patterns throughout the year.
To exemplify, 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, making sure 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 allow fully asynchronous request processing and are able to auto-scale up to 5x its total capacity.
Go for an integrated payment solution
As a rule, the effectiveness of a payment solution 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 the need 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.
Final words
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, keep them updated on changes and pre-empt problems. This helps resolve issues fast, unlock maximum value and ensure your business is always performing at its peak.
