Business is ticking over and things are certainly OK, but do you ever wonder if your payment gateway provider could be doing more to improve conversions and increase sales?
If any of these six common complaints ring true to you, it’s time to ask some questions.
Global growth feels like a challenge
Your growth strategy is globally focused, but you’re not brimming with excitement about the possibilities. It feels and looks like a lot of hassle. You’re concerned about being able to handle new currencies and payment types.
If you don’t have trust in your payment gateway to deliver an intuitive, localised experience for customers – regardless of their location – it’s a bad sign.
Your payment gateway should, at the very least, offer local acquiring to reduce unnecessary declines from fraud. Without this, you can expect friction at every turn while trying to accept payments from new territories.
Your eCommerce conversion rates aren’t getting any better
You’ve tweaked the customer experience as much as your current gateway lets you, but conversions are still frustratingly low. You have high levels of repeat customers so you know it’s not the product.
Low checkout conversion rates often point to unnecessary friction in the checkout process. It could be an issue with integrating your current gateway with your eCommerce platform – there’s a specific issue for a specific type of customer – or it could just be that your chosen provider is experiencing a lot of declines. 30% of eCommerce payment failures are due to fraud alerts, transaction limits or cross-border friction.
Your online customers are stuck with an ‘out of the box’ experience
Your checkout page is branded and you’ve removed the features you don’t need, but it still feels ‘out of the box’. There’s more you could do to optimise user experience, if only your gateway offered the flexibility to do it.
Pre-populated fields for returning visitors and dynamic currency options determined by location are just two of the customisation options available with BlueSnap that are proven to improve conversions and sales.
Mobile payments are still ‘alternative’
You’re processing some payments from mobile, but nowhere near in line with global mobile usage. Customers can convert on mobile, but it’s not a great user experience and they frequently bounce on the checkout page.
Some payment gateway providers still treat mobile as an ‘alternative’ payment method. As a result, your mobile user experience isn’t optimised. It’s a source of friction for customers and the ones that do convert have a frustrating experience.
Last year, the balance was tipped in favour of shopping on the move, with smartphones and tablet accounting for 51% of ecommerce retail sales* – and this figure is only likely to rise. You should have the capability to customise a frictionless mobile checkout experience, with the same local language and currency capabilities of your desktop experience.
You worry about server downtime
Conversion rates are good, your analytics suggest customers are transacting with minimal friction, but you’re still worried about losing sales due to server outages. It’s happened once and you can’t escape the nagging worry that it can happen again.
Even if you’ve not experienced an outage for a while, the fact that you’re worrying about the effect on your sales if it happens again it is a clear sign that you’re not getting the level of service you deserve.
BlueSnap operates a hot-hot technology stack with failover protection. So if ever a server goes down, the back-up server is already running to take up the slack. There’s no lag when switching from one server to the other. Downtime is just not an issue.
You need to speak to a human about your payment gateway issues, but you can’t
You’ve held a senior tech role at your company for years and yes – you probably could fix this particular problem yourself if you had a couple of hours to pore over the documentation. But you’ve got a myriad other things to do. You need a quick answer to a relatively simple question, but there’s nobody to have a conversation with.
Answering integration and maintenance questions relies on information, as well as competence. If your payment gateway provider can’t give you access to a senior level technical consultant (and not just a call centre) whenever you need them, perhaps it’s time to shop around.