Get Your Payments Holiday Ready
Don’t get stuck in a jam. No, we’re not talking about that tailback on the ring road; we’re talking about your digital traffic. With Halloween over, people are getting ready to make their holiday purchases. November and December always have increased sales, as for many it is the season of giving and bargains (Christmas and Black Friday). Make sure your business is prepared for a parade of people looking to buy your goods and services. To help you get the most out of this season of shopping, we have put together a list of things you should bear in mind when putting your seasonal payments strategy together.
Add additional payment methods to increase your reach
With more and more people turning to online shopping, that one payment method you have available isn’t going to cut it. People are much more likely to complete the checkout process if there is a payment method which they recognize. It is worth remembering that different countries have their preferred international and local payment methods and that it is also the case for different generations. Understanding these preferences is a key factor for increasing conversion. However, there is always a however, the holiday season is a time when people buy gifts for others, so just because your shop is aimed at young twenty-somethings doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep a more mature payment option available, as how else will grandma buy her favorite granddaughter that something special?
Thanks to IXOPAY’s flexible architecture you are able to add and remove payment providers to and from your portfolio with ease. Check out our list of payment methods and where they are available. For more detailed advice get in touch with our sales team.
Give your payments page a makeover and payments churn
We were always told to never judge a book by its cover. But, if your payment page takes your customer off to an unbranded external site, they will get suspicious. By making sure your users stay on your site in a branded environment they will feel more confident in completing a transaction, improving your conversion rates by reducing checkout abandonment.
Use cascading/failover, volume/load balancing, and geolocation to improve authorization rates
How can you ensure that as many legitimate transactions as possible are authorized? By using a smart transaction routing engine you are able to implement rules and such as cascading/failover, volume/load balancing, and geolocation optimization that will help increase your conversion rates.
Cascading/Failover:
In the event of technical problems, commercial disputes or other business challenges your payment service providers might face, you can use scenario planning to anticipate and reduce transaction failures by implementing cascaded or failover transaction processing. If the transaction is declined by the first payment service provider for one of the above reasons, or due to the transaction’s risk assessment, the IXOPAY Smart Routing Engine can automatically forward the transaction to alternative service providers and so on until the transaction is either successfully completed or all available options have been exhausted. This simple technique can improve conversion rates especially during busy times when some providers become overloaded.
Volume/load balancing:
This time of year, we know that a lot of our clients will be having increased business. Another way in which you can support more payments is by using volume balancing. This is when you split your payments up via percentage between multiple PSPs, meaning that they will not be overwhelmed with an increased number of transactions to process, ensuring that authorizations speeds don’t lag and declined transactions are avoided.
Geolocation optimization:
Geographic criteria are not only crucial in keeping your processing fees down – the closer the distance between the issuers and the acquirer the smaller the fees - but they also play an important role in authorization. If you are selling domestically and internationally you need more payment methods. With IXOPAY you can organize them so that if a consumer in the Netherlands is making a purchase iDeal will be at the top of the list but if the consumer is in the UK it will be Bacs. This intuitive behavior not only provides customers with more appropriate payment methods, but it also means that transactions will have a greater chance of authorization. When it comes to credit card payments the IXOPAY Smart Routing Engine (together with the Fee Management Engine) will forward it to a regional payment service provider depending on the country of origin of the card; reducing transaction fees and increasing your conversion rate.
Update your risk rules to reduce fraud
With the IXOPAY Risk Management Engine, you can set a series of rules that will reduce fraud, these rules give each transaction a risk score, via in-built scorecard logic. The risk score can trigger various actions such as enabling 3D secure, being sent for manual review or an automatic decline. Some of the risk rules you can choose from are:
- Whether the customer’s IP address matches the country of origin of the credit card used for payment
- Whether the value of a transaction is unusually low or high based on the transaction history
- Whether the same credit card is in use by multiple users
- Whether multiple transactions with different credit cards have been initiated by the same end device (device fingerprinting)
- Whether the end customer is on the sanctions list
By adding these rules and tailoring them to your business needs you will be able to significantly reduce fraud. If you are not with a payment orchestration platform that provides these functions there are fraud solution products available that will be able to offer a similar but less holistic service.
Analyze your data so you can improve your payment performance for the next rush
And finally, your data tells you the truth, so it's time to listen. There is always room for improvement so read, interpret, and adapt. IXOPAY stores the data from all payment providers in a uniformed format. This allows you to analyze your data as a whole or at granular level in any which way you please. You can also create pivot tables directly in the platform, so you can quickly see which PSP has the best authorization rates in which country or which payment method is the most popular. The data can be exported into your business intelligence software. With a payment agnostic provider, you are able to see all the data from a clear and unbiased perspective. See what else is possible here.
About IXOPAY
IXOPAY is a payments orchestration platform enabling independent, flexible and global payment processing. As a highly scalable and PCI-DSS certified “fintech enabler”, IXOPAY fulfills the needs of large merchants as well as those of “white label” clients: payment service providers (PSPs), acquirers and independent sales organizations (ISOs). The modern, easily extendable architecture offers smart transaction routing & cascading, state-of-the-art risk & fraud management, fully automated reconciliation and settlements processing, comprehensive reporting as well as plugin-based integration of acquirers, payment service providers and alternative payment methods (APMs).
IXOPAY is part of the IXOLIT Group, founded in Vienna, Austria in 2001. With local entities in Austria and the USA, IXOLIT supports national and international customers across various industry verticals. The owner-led and -financed company has grown from 2 to more than 65 employees and is focused on building innovative solutions for eCommerce.
Please find more information about IXOPAY here: https://www.ixopay.com