Choosing the right payments partner: Your biggest ally for business growth | Worldline

There’s never been a better time for merchants to embrace ecommerce. In 2020, there was over €717 billion spent online across the EU, and for those merchants who had a strong brand presence from a physical store, their online sales jumped by a remarkable 83%. Even more impressive is that over the past year, many merchant platforms have seen such an unprecedented rise in website traffic that it has surpassed even their holiday season peaks.

This alone means we’re in a crucial moment of time. Merchants who jump into the momentum and make the most of this boom will likely see a positive impact on their business – but finding the right payment service provider (PSP) is necessary to power this move.

How to find the right partner for you

A global payments partner may be supporting your first step outside your domestic region or they could be brought in to optimise your current payment setup. Either way, there are many viable options to explore and you could feel hard-pressed to find the right fit.

It’s important to remember that no ecommerce site is the same, and every merchant has different business growth objectives. It shouldn’t just be the price and location of a PSP that influences your choice. The size of your business and your customers’ payment behaviour are crucial considerations for optimising your checkout and keeping conversion rates high.

Don’t miss a sale

To support your ecommerce performance, you’ll need a payment platform that can comfortably handle transactions and traffic during your peak sales periods. A stable and robust platform will give you vast opportunities to increase your acceptance and conversion rates, better understand your customers, and strengthen your revenue streams.

When processing large volumes of transactions, the slightest technical hitch can have a significant financial impact. One second lost in downtime could result in thousands of customer-confirmed transactions failing to be authorised. During peak periods such as Black Friday or seasonal sales, a website can receive hundreds of thousands (even millions) of orders in a very short timeframe. Some merchants can experience transaction volume growth of over 500% during peak periods.

As for platform stability, Worldline is backed up by three redundant data centres, meaning it has 99.95% availability – so you never miss a single sale.

Commenting on Worldline’s platform, one merchant in the pharmaceutical industry said:

Optimise your authorisation rates

• 69% of shoppers fail to complete transactions at the checkout page
• Between 5% and 20% of transactions fail or are rejected after customers hit the pay button

A transaction request submitted by the customer can be rejected by the acquirer due to reasons such as data validation, insufficient funds or authentication failures. Key for acquirers here is to feedback the status of the transaction quickly to the shopper. Should there be a delay in response, this will have an impact on customer abandonment as they are not expecting to wait for too long. Worldline guarantees an average load time of less than three seconds.

Your payment platform should offer your customers their preferred payment methods. Adding more localised payment methods is one of the most effective actions you can take to boost your checkout conversions. Worldline accepts over 350 payment methods – and has above average acceptance rates. For example:

• for Cartes Bancaires, Worldline’s acceptance rate is 0.7% higher than the market average
• for Bancontact, its acceptance rate is 1.2% higher than the nearest main competitor
• for iDeal, it sees an acceptance rate 4.9% higher than the market average
• for acceptance of Visa and Mastercard, Worldline offers an acceptance rate 3.3% higher than the market average
  

An ecommerce setup adapted to your needs

The right PSP will let you choose from a wide range of integration options, from a ready-to-use payment page to a full menu of APIs, to customise your checkout flow.

You can redirect your customers to a hosted payment page where they can input their payment details and submit the transaction for processing. Saving your customers’ payment details with a hosted tokenisation page (that’s seamlessly blended into your site) will help your customers pay quicker on their next visit, boosting customer loyalty.

You can also use plugins to integrate with the world’s most popular ecommerce platforms. With a full range of secure APIs, you can encrypt payment data within your app and securely send transactions for processing. Your PSP should store sensitive data safely on secure servers, meaning you won’t have to worry about PCI DSS compliance.

The right PSP should be able to deliver international payment acceptance through a wide acquirer network, so you don’t need to have separate contracts with local acquirers. You can increase operational efficiency by having one single contract to support all your needs, including technology integration, quick settlement for optimised treasury processes, and one reporting file for faster and easier reconciliation.

Taking it further with business insights

Beyond the general payment setup, make sure you optimise your conversion rates with the help of a data and business intelligence tool. Managing your activity daily to fine-tune your sales strategy is essential to accelerating your business growth.

Explore our business intelligence tool, MyPerformance, to optimise your payment performance and increase the number of converting customers at every stage of the payment flow.

Designed to analyse your transactions and KPIs in real-time, the tool allows you to keep track of your business evolution. Data insights come with clear, accessible explanations and helpful tips as to why transactions are failing, or where process improvements can be made.

Key benefits of a business intelligence tool:

• assess the rejections overview dashboard with your most popular payment method to see if it is experiencing a normal or high level of rejected transactions.
• see how recently added payment methods are performing or select multiple countries to understand your performance in a certain geographical area.
• view the average transaction value dashboard with one country at a time to understand how much different areas are spending throughout the year.
• understand how your acceptance and authorisation rates are performing, and where you can take action to improve them

Each merchant will have specific requirements depending on their individual circumstances but

small changes can make a big impact on your business. Choosing the right payments partner can be overwhelming considering how many options are there for you. The right PSP should guide and support you in optimising your payment flow to maximise your revenue. In the end, everything should run smoothly from a payments perspective so you can focus on your business growth.

If you require more in-depth advice on your payment setup, get in touch with our payment experts today.