3 Questions You Should Be Asking Your Payment Gateway

“If it’s not broke don’t fix it”! For many merchants this holds true – they set up a website, plug into a payment gateway, and never look back. I believe more in Mark Cuban’s approach “business is 24/7/365 and if you’re not getting better you’re losing ground”. For many eCommerce merchants today, they can easily lose ground by not asking the right questions about how they receive online payments. In an effort to help you maximize your conversions and make more money, here are 3 questions you should be asking your current payment gateway. 

Are we asking for the wrong things from our customers at check out?

You have your customer at the goal line and they’re ready to check out. Losing them now is unacceptable. Some typical reasons customers may abandon their carts:

• You have too many fields to fill in
  • Reducing fields from 6 to 3 can increase conversions 66% on average
• You don’t offer a coupon
  • Allowing your customers to use a coupon can increase their likelihood of checking out by 8%
• You don’t have the payment type they want to buy with
  • 59% percent of customers will abandon if they don’t have their preferred payment type
• You don’t have the language or currency they want to buy in
  • Lack of local language/currency can stop 75% of international shoppers

When you remove these checkout objections you create what we call a frictionless experience. For some of our merchants this can increase their sales as much 20%.

What are you doing to increase my current conversion rate?

There are many reasons why a payment can be declined. The key is to dig into why these payments are not converting. Your current processor should be giving you your processing success rates. With this information, you’ll want to look into where your shoppers are coming from and the currency they are purchasing in – these insights may shed light on a problem you didn’t know you had. Not only that, but if your processor is only connected to one bank, the lack the ability to significantly improve your conversion rates. Routing transactions to the right bank is crucial when processing payments so having connections to more than one bank is essential to your conversion. In fact, having this functionality can increase your payment conversions as much as 3%.

Should we be offering Subscription billing methods?

Customers have their own budget and agenda. They may prefer to pay quarterly, monthly or annually. Giving subscription options will not only satisfy your customer but could increase your conversions. Large ticket transactions are much more likely to be declined than smaller ones. For example, breaking up a yearly contract of $2,000 to 4 payments of $500 could decrease the chances that transaction gets declined. Showing monthly and/or quarterly revenue always sits well with investors and how Wall Street will view your business which never hurts.

If your sales are not what you want them to be, don’t just look to the sales and marketing team. You may have opportunity to improve by just asking the right questions from your payment provider and streamlining your payment process. Need more help? This Checkout Conversion Index (CCI) has everything you need to succeed when it comes to increasing checkout conversions: