Collecting payments online? You may be encountering issues such as failed payments or gateway errors that are stealing from your business. The digital payments industry has grown tremendously and for most businesses, their payment gateways are the lifeblood for surviving in this extremely competitive environment.
Improving your payment experience holds the key to improving your overall revenue and customer satisfaction. Most businesses that collect payments via a POS or online can boost their sales, just by smoothening out the checkout experience.
At Payor, enabling hassle-free payments for your customers is one of our success metrics. We are constantly looking for ways to improve the payment performance for our clients so that they can grow without hiccups.
In this blog, we are sharing 4 best practices that will help you get more out of your payment system. Payor account holders, take a close note!
Analyze Payment Statistics
Payment statistics such as conversion rate, total time taken to checkout, abandoned carts, etc, tell you a lot about your payment performance. Most businesses are only concerned about maintaining a healthy approval rate on their payments but that alone isn’t sufficient.
These advanced statistics can help you understand how your customers interact with your business. For instance, if you’re observing an abnormally high chargeback rate, it may signal that there is something wrong with your fulfillment process.
Similarly, these statistics can highlight problems that are hard to foresee or even guess. Therefore, it’s a great idea to keep a cat’s eye on some of the most important statistics that your payment gateway provides you.
The following metrics should be on your list;
- Average cost per invoice
- Invoice cycle time
- Overall conversion rate
- Chargebacks and bad debt
- Average revenue per user
- Average order value
- Checkout abandonment rate
Collaborate with Your Payment Partner
Your payment partner or payment gateway provider could be one of your best advisors for improving your payment performance. Most providers have dedicated client success teams that help businesses choose the best payment products and streamline workflows.
Therefore, it’s one of the steps that you shouldn’t miss out on. Payor customers are already aware of our support teams who enable new businesses to quickly signup and get their first payment accepted. There are a lot of challenges when it comes to setting up a merchant account also, which need to be addressed proactively.
There are chances that you can further maximize the performance of your payment system without making monumental changes. But it can only happen when you clearly address the concerns you’re facing. In many cases, the support teams can also help you meet local challenges that are unique to your business and environment.
Understand SCA
Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is a rule which is a part of the PSD2 regulation in Europe. It applies to payments being authenticated for customers from the EU.
The update mostly applies to e-commerce store owners or any trades business that carries out online activity hailing from Europe. The update has introduced stricter authentication guidelines that can impact your payment success ratio. It basically analyses each transaction as per 3DS2 norms that deeply look at each activity taking place between the payer and the business.
SCA may lead to a few soft declines but mostly, it’ll ramp up the payment experience. If your business is facing declines from European customers, it’s worth escalating the issue to your payment provider so that you can fix it in time, and with the right procedure in place.
Configure the correct MCCs
MCCs stands for Merchant Category Codes which basically identify each merchant pertaining to a particular industry and business type. These codes help payment providers such as Payor to record the business activity that its products are being used for. Each code reflects upon certain norms and criteria set for business transactions.
For instance, MCCs may help the provider recognize if a business belongs to High-Risk categories.
Many a time, the MCCs are not correctly configured at the merchant’s end which leads to conflicts in payment processing. You may end up receiving gateway errors such as “Blocked for fraud” which could be due to a wrong MCC configuration.
Therefore, if you’re facing any such issues, it’s a good idea to get your MCC checked.
Conclusion
Improving your payment performance positively impacts your business growth and revenue collection. While most entrepreneurs are tech-savvy enough to understand payment issues on their own, it only makes sense to employ extra measures to boost payment performance. After all, each failed transaction costs your business, not only the charge value but also the customer confidence, which is very hard to win back.
