Why Bother with eCommerce Payment Analytics?

Operating your business in multiple markets can be daunting, especially if you’re not an expert in the preferred payment methods or currencies of every single one of them. Payment analytics can help you reconcile payment data from multiple accounts and currencies and ensure your eCommerce retailer is getting the best conversion rates and reaching customers across various regions.

For example, if you’re looking at your analytics in South America and notice a lack of customers in Brazil that might prompt a discussion about why you’re not appealing to that market. That discussion might uncover that you only accept credit cards, and about 25% of online transactions in Brazil are paid with a local payment type called Boletos. By not offering that payment type, you’re missing out on a significant proportion of that market.

How Can Payment Analytics Help You Make Smarter Business Decisions?

Understand Conversion Rates and Local Payment Types

If your company operates internationally, you probably have shoppers from all over the world. But when those shoppers use credit cards from their home country at retailers located elsewhere, fraud alerts could be triggered at the bank that issued the card.

For example, if you’re a U.S. retailer processing payments in the U.S. from cards issued in Europe, the issuing banks might look at the transaction history of the card owner and see they live in Europe and have not shopped outside of Europe before and decline the payment.

If even 20% of your shoppers are from Europe, those transaction processing issues can have major implications on your business. Payment analytics can help you determine where your shoppers are, how they’re paying, and if issues are arising because of international transactions.

For example, local transactions are much more likely to be approved and processed, so a U.S. retailer might decide to open a legal entity in Europe in order to process the payments locally. Doing so would also reduce foreign transaction fees and cross-border fees for both the retailer and their shoppers.

Insight Into Payment Trends

In addition to showing how cost-effective your transaction processing is, payment analytics can provide insight into where your customers are located and how you’re reaching them. Some regions are more card-friendly than others and some regions primarily use local cards, thus only accepting international credit cards can prohibit your ability to access some markets.

Being able to process transactions at multiple banks in multiple locations around the world gives eCommerce retailers the ability to process local payment types and optimize their conversion rates. Payment analytics and reporting can help you reconcile data from multiple accounts in multiple currencies down to the penny.

If you’re operating on a global scale, you want to ensure you’re maximizing your payment conversions and decreasing your costs. Based on the data revealed in your payment analytics, you can create a plan to expand your reach and support international customers better.

Depending on the issue, a retailer could take an action like increasing payment type acceptance, allowing customers to choose which currency they pay in, increasing the payment page language offerings, or establishing legal entities in different regions.

For example, sales, marketing, and operations platform GreenRope only accepted U.S. dollars, which was deterring customers outside of the U.S. Adding additional currencies enabled them to increase their customer base internationally and help resellers increase sales by offering the product in local currencies.

Decrease Chargebacks

On top of monitoring conversion rates and customer information, payment analytics can help retailers track their chargeback rates.

Even the best eCommerce retailer will have chargebacks from time to time, but if your chargeback rate is 1% or higher, payment processors may refuse to work with you. Understanding chargebacks is important to minimize that rate, and having a built-in chargeback management tool can help you better understand why chargebacks are occurring so you can reduce the rate and minimize the burden for your finance and customer success teams.

The Takeaway

Payment analytics can help you minimize your costs and maximize your reach to improve your business’s overall performance. Understanding how fraud and chargebacks are impacting your bottom line is essential for your eCommerce retailer’s growth and so is understanding your customer base. Payment analytics can provide insight into how your products are performing in different regions and how different payment types and currencies are contributing to your revenue. Having those insights at your fingertips will allow you to hone your sales strategy.

Learn more about how BlueSnap’s reporting and analytics tools can help you improve your conversion rates and help you better appeal to customers globally.