Contents
- What is Online Payment Strategy?
- Things to Consider When Developing an Online Payment Strategy
- Evaluate Your Payment Options
- Identify Your Business Goals
- Analyze Industry Best Payment Practices
- Consider User Experience in Checkout Page Design
- Conclusion
As a result of digitalization, online payments have become an indispensable part of daily life. In this case, businesses that want to offer their customers a seamless payment step have accelerated their payment strategy work.
In addition, parameters such as efficiency and profitability that can be achieved through optimizations in the online payment step also play an important role in developing these strategies.
In this article, we will examine the importance of having an effective payment strategy for your business and include what you should pay attention to when developing this strategy.
What is Online Payment Strategy?
According to the research, the global digital payments market is expected to exceed $12.5 trillion by 2027. This shows that the way businesses manage their payment processes can deeply impact both their profitability and scalability.
A digital payment strategy can be defined as a strategy that includes the plans required for businesses to efficiently manage and facilitate electronic transactions. This strategy may include selecting appropriate payment service providers, integrating specific technologies, and adapting to the latest trends in the payment space. An effective digital payment strategy aims to improve customer experience, increase transaction speed, and strengthen security.
Optimizing your business’s payment operations reduces costs, streamlines processes, improves customer experience and increases turnover.
Things to Consider When Developing an Online Payment Strategy
In order for a business to effectively structure its payment strategy processes, it must first create an effective strategic structure.
Therefore, before exploring specific strategies that can help you improve your payments ecosystem, it is healthy for businesses to create a custom payments optimization strategy that fits their unique needs, goals, business model, target market, and growth opportunities.
At this point, it is necessary to remember that the most effective way to carry out this process is to get support from a team of experts in the field of payment. Since payment is an area that requires serious expertise and experience, working with such a team allows you to detect critical errors or important problems that you had not noticed before and follow a strategy accordingly.
With this reminder, we can talk about the steps you can take to develop a payment strategy:
Evaluate Your Payment Options
In the first stage, it would be useful to evaluate existing or potential payment service providers and the solutions you can use at this point. At this point, the technological capabilities of the payment providers you want to work with and their competence in the scenario where you scale your business or expand abroad should be important to you.
When making this assessment, you can consider your transaction volume, transaction costs, customer feedback and identified security risks. For detailed information, you can review our article titled Guide to Receiving Payments from Abroad for Businesses , which includes what you should pay attention to when moving your operations abroad.
In addition to these, integration processes are also among the most important issues. Because, when you want to work with more payment service providers over time, integrating each one separately or managing each one through different panels means serious labor and cost. At this point, payment orchestration solutions will make this process easier for you. For example, payment orchestration Craftgate allows you to access the payment service providers or alternative payment methods you want from a single point with its Payment Gateway feature and manage them all from a single panel.
When developing a payment strategy, you should also correctly evaluate the habits of your customer base and the opportunities and risks in your target market. For example, if you are an online grocery chain, being able to accept online payments with meal cards provides a significant competitive advantage for you. You can learn the details of why you should include alternative payment methods in your payment strategy by reviewing our article titled Alternative Payment Methods for the Right Marketing Strategy .
Similarly, if your target audience is a relatively young consumer base, offering digital wallets or shopping credit solutions as payment methods can be an important reason for users to choose your brand.
Identify Your Business Goals
The most important factor that determines the payment strategy processes will undoubtedly be your business goals. If your business’s priorities are to regulate costs, optimizing the amount you pay for commission rates in terms of payment strategy will be the right way.
For example, Craftgate allows you to direct payment requests coming to your platform to the most advantageous virtual POS as a commission with the Smart and Dynamic Payment Routing solution you have an agreement with . This routing process is carried out automatically, in accordance with the rules you have determined. Thus, you know that thanks to Craftgate, your payments will go through the payment service provider that is most advantageous for you.
In addition, the strategy you care about as a business may be to increase your conversion rate or increase your turnover. For this, it is important to reduce your cart abandonment rates and complete some optimizations that reduce the conversion rate. For detailed information on the subject, you can review our articles titled Reducing Cart Abandonment Rate & Increasing Conversion Rate Part-1 and Part-2 .
Another way to increase your turnover is to benefit from solutions that allow you to receive payment even in virtual POS outages or system payment errors. Payment service providers (Virtual POS or payment institutions) that you will make an agreement with may occasionally experience system outages (downtime). This is quite possible in software processes. However, in terms of user preferences and priorities in e-commerce processes, this situation causes your business to lose turnover.
If a customer who wants to make a payment on your website cannot make a payment due to a virtual POS outage at that moment, it may cause them to give up shopping. This means a possible loss of turnover for your business and a negative impact on your customer experience.
At this point, Craftgate’s Autopilot solution helps you. Autopilot directs payments to another working virtual POS in case of any interruption in the virtual POSs that our member businesses have agreements with. This happens automatically and your customers and business are not affected by the possible consequences of this interruption. In other words, you will not experience a loss of turnover. In addition, your customer experience due to the payment step will not be negatively affected.
Analyze Industry Best Payment Practices
Examining the payment practices and strategies used by successful businesses in your industry will help guide you. Case studies, research reports, and success stories for insights into effective payment strategy processes will help you decide what to include in your strategy.
When doing this, make sure that the practices in question are compatible with your business model and goals. For example, if you are a business that receives payments via a subscription model, then you should definitely evaluate solutions such as card storage in terms of payment strategy. In addition, if you want to develop loyalty programs, closed-circuit wallet solutions will also strengthen your strategy.
Craftgate offers its customers the opportunity to make easy payments without entering card information with its PCI DSS-1 compliant Card Storage solution offered to member businesses. In addition, it allows its customers to send points/gifts to their wallet accounts with its Closed Circuit Wallet solution.
Consider User Experience in Checkout Page Design
According to a study by PWC , 32% of users stop using their favorite brands because of a single bad experience and expect a smooth journey from beginning to end. As you might expect, one of the most important touchpoints in this journey is the payment step. According to another study by Baynmard Institute , 22% of users abandon the payment step without making a purchase.
As you can see, prioritizing user experience (UX-UI) is vital for companies, including the payment process. The first steps you can take at this point are;
- Keeping the payment step short,
- Eliminate distracting elements in the payment page design,
- design a simple payment page,
- If there is a numeric field in the information entry fields (card number, CVV code, etc.), there are practices such as preventing information from being entered with letters in this section.
However, the steps you can take are not limited to these. Therefore, for more detailed information on the subject , you can read the section titled “Shopping Cart and Checkout Steps Design” in our article titled Reduce Cart Abandonment Rate & Increase Conversion Rate | Part 1 .
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many points to consider when developing a payment strategy. Therefore, beyond deciding which payment service provider you will work with to receive online payments, you need to look at these processes from a much broader perspective.
For this reason, planning your strategy correctly from the first day you launch your operations will provide a great advantage for your business. However, if you are already receiving online payments, there are many steps you can take to maximize your payment process. Therefore, developing a good payment strategy is a process that a business should implement and implement at all times.
