How a Payment Gateway Can Help Boost Your E-Commerce Conversion Rate
E-commerce businesses have a few metrics that can give helpful insights into whether their sales strategy is working. One of these metrics is known as the conversion rate. As defined by the Corporate Finance Institute, the conversion rate is the number of leads that a business successfully graduates into sales, expressed as a percentage of total leads. For e-commerce, this manifests as the percent of site visitors who successfully make a purchase.
As an e-commerce merchant, it’s important that you identify which factors are in your control when it comes to improving your conversation rate. While you won’t be able to make all site visitors like your product or service, you do have the ability to create a more seamless buying experience so that customers are less likely to abandon their shopping carts mid-purchase. There are several reasons why a customer might decide to abandon their shopping cart before checkout, but one of the most prominent reasons is a poor payment experience. Thus, for a business to combat the phenomenon of abandoned carts—which results in poor conversion rates—they need to think proactively about their payment processing technology.
By integrating with a payment gateway that’s feature-rich and caters to the latest customer trends, businesses will find better success in creating a streamlined checkout experience with improved conversion rates. In this article, we’ll examine several common pitfalls of the checkout process and share some solutions to these challenges.
Challenge: Time-Consuming Manual Entry of Payment Data
Solution: One-Click Payment Methods and Card-On-File
Increasingly, customers just don’t want to take the time to type in their payment information when shopping online. They may rethink their impulse purchase if they need to dig through their wallet and read off their card numbers, or they may push off a necessary purchase and end up finding a more convenient alternative.
There are several ways you can bring your customers a faster payment experience:
1. One-Click Payment Methods:
The latest one-click payment methods, such as mobile wallets and Click to Pay, allow customers to pay online without needing to re-enter their card information every time:
- Mobile Wallets: Mobile wallets like Google Pay and Apple Pay enable customers to securely store their credit or debit card information within their smartphone. When shopping from their mobile device—a shopping behavior that’s surging in popularity—the customer simply clicks the mobile wallet icon at checkout, and their payment information is applied.
- Click to Pay: Click to Pay is a checkout technology developed by the four major card brands: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. As is the case with mobile wallets, Click to Pay allows users to pay without having to enter their card details every time—they simply need to register once. Click to Pay uses a next-generation security framework known as Secure Remote Commerce (SRC), which means that e-commerce merchants who implement this technology will also benefit from enhanced security and reduced rates of fraud.
2. Card-On-File:
By giving your customers the option to create an account and securely store payment information for future purchases, they’ll be able to complete the checkout process that much faster. If you decide to offer card-on-file to your customers, it’s important that you integrate with a payment gateway that promises robust security and compliance with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). This will ensure that stored payment data is kept securely away from your server and is thus not at risk of being intercepted by hackers.
Cardknox, for example, is a fully PCI-compliant payment gateway that utilizes tokenization technology to encrypt sensitive data. In simple terms, this means that all customer data is secured in tokens form, meaning that even if the tokens were to be intercepted, there’s no way it could be decrypted and used. This multi-level security methodology ensures that all customer data remains secure through each transaction. There’s no more need to worry about data leaks or breaches.
Challenge: Redirects or Page Design That Raises Security Concerns
Solution: Customizable, Embedded Payment Forms
In an effort to keep sensitive card data away from their server, e-commerce merchants may choose not to host their own payment page—instead, they’ll redirect the visitor to a third-party site. However, while this solution is secure, it can actually raise red flags for customers.
To avoid having to redirect customers, some merchants embed a third-party payment form on their webpage. However, these forms often cannot be customized to match the layout of the page, which can again make shoppers feel uncomfortable about payment security.
The solution to these challenges is to utilize a third-party payment form that can be fully customized to match your website’s design. Cardknox’s iFields technology does just that, as it gives developers the ability to customize the form’s display while also ensuring that payment data is kept away from the merchant’s server.
Challenge: Fraud Screening Software That’s “Too Good”
Solution: AI-Driven Fraud Screening
Fraud is unavoidable in the modern e-commerce world. Many payment gateways have built-in screening tools to prevent fraud, yet oftentimes these tools will decline legitimate transactions. Fortunately, there are fraud screening tools on the market that promise robust security without declining legitimate transactions, and they do so by utilizing artificial intelligence (AI). An AI fraud screening software, such as the one offered by Cardknox, can learn from its mistakes— and while it may decline one false-positive transaction, directed AI training means it will recognize these transactions as valid in the future. Customers will abandon their carts if they can’t complete payment. AI-trained gateways can help prevent future re-occurrences of these false-positive fraud detections.
Payment Gateways are Integral to Boosting Conversion Rates
If you design your site to go along the rules of a sales funnel, then you’ve spent a lot of time gearing the consumer up for a sale. Conversions are time-sensitive, and the longer a consumer waits on buying a product, the less likely they are to choose to do so. If the payment gateway declines their payment or makes it difficult for them to pay, they’ll just give up instead of spending their money. Streamlining your website to accept payments faster and more securely should be among your website priorities. Cardknox offers affordable payment gateway services, together with easy integration and multi-layer security. Contact us today to determine how we can help you increase your conversion rate by streamlining your checkout process!
