Look, we get it. Handling payments can be a pain. Often seen as a cost center, they’re a necessary means to an end so you can accept payments from customers, grow your business, and ultimately, get money in your bank account.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. When done right, payments can be a revenue enabler, improve customer satisfaction, set you apart from the competition and more. However, many businesses don’t have the resources, time or insight needed to optimize for payment success.

In this article, we’ll go over 9 tried-and-tested best practices any business can adopt to leverage payments for growth—all with powerful, no-code automation from Primer.

How to boost payment success in 9 ways with no code

The following 9 points come under the broader umbrella categories of conversion, acceptance and fraud.

1. Offer more payment options

2. Adapt to any market

3. Collect less data

4. Stop forcing friction

5. Build in a backup

6. Get expert payment support

7. Pay attention to the smallest details

8. Treat customers unequally

9. Double up on protection

Conversion

The average checkout abandonment rate touches a frightening 69%. Making small changes to optimize for conversion can have a big impact on top-line sales.

#1. Offer more payment options

This may seem obvious, but if your customers can’t pay you at checkout, they won’t complete their purchase.

Today, traditional card payments only make up 35% of online transactions worldwide. If you choose to exclusively accept cards, you’re seriously missing out: 56% of shoppers want a variety of payment methods at checkout.

With the multitude of payment options now available in each market, people are spoiled for choice, and often adopt a variety of payment methods to use as they see fit. 15% of consumers use at least 3 payment methods, such as digital wallets and buy now, pay later solutions.

To survive, your business has to adapt to consumer behaviors—using one payment processor simply isn’t enough anymore. However, keeping up with new payment innovations, and integrating and maintaining payment methods is both tricky and costly.

Primer supports over 50 payment integrations, which you can view in our Connections hub. You can add any third-party integration to your checkout in a click, right from Primer’s dashboard—with no code. The best bit? We’re always adding more Connections so your payment stack can effortlessly scale over time.

#2. Adapt to any market

Now we’ve agreed choice is key, remember that it can be a double-edged sword. While you’d like to enable customers to pay however they like, an abundance of (irrelevant) options results in an overly complicated checkout, which accounts for 17% of abandoned shopping carts.

So, how do you cater to specific regional preferences without overwhelming your customers?

Primer developed Universal Checkout, a low-code product that lets you easily build your checkout in context with a few simple clicks. In the dashboard, you can add limitless payment methods, then choose where and when they’re displayed to suit customers anywhere in the world. By dynamically presenting the best options for each market, you’ll speed up the checkout process for your customers.

For example, PayNow is a popular peer-to-peer, real-time fund transfer system used in Singapore. By setting PayNow to only display at checkout for customers in Singapore, you’re offering the payment option they need, while streamlining the checkout for shoppers everywhere else.

#3. Collect less data

While we’re on the topic of making things simple: do you really need all that data you’re collecting from your customers? We’ve all been there: nothing’s worse than filling out endless form fields when you’re trying to make a purchase. Still, research shows U.S. retailers require customers to complete twice as many fields as necessary.

Now, at Primer, we understand this data may sometimes be required to help prevent fraud, or is needed for dispute settlements. This is why merchants on Primer can easily set billing conditions for card payments and only capture data within Universal Checkout when absolutely necessary.

In Primer’s dashboard, for example, you can set up a rule so only the billing address postal code is requested for card payments, and specify even more by activating this rule for high-risk items or customers only.

#4. Stop forcing friction

Recently, new regulations for 3D Secure in the European Economic Area (EEA) and UK were put in place, adding another obligatory step to the checkout process. But has this also forced you to adopt 3D Secure (3DS) globally? While 3DS offers a great layer of protection from card payment fraud, it adds more friction and can harm your conversion rate, especially when customers aren’t familiar with it.

This is why Primer has built Adaptive 3DS. Rather than defaulting to force 3DS for all customers, or not adding it in at all, leave it to us to dynamically choose when 3DS should be triggered.

Our AI-based 3DS product evaluates customers’ buying history, location, even which device they’re using—so we know exactly when to issue a customer challenge, and when to allow a frictionless checkout experience. All this without typing a single line of code.

Acceptance

Now you’re confident the number of customers that make it through checkout has improved, it’s time to tackle the next challenge. One of the questions we get asked the most is: “How do I create the best possible chance for successful payments?”

#5. Build in a backup

Your biggest sales period of the year has arrived. You’ve spent months planning for it: ordering inventory, crafting tailored marketing campaigns, increasing advertising spend. Everything’s led to this crucial moment, and… your payment processor is down. 

Due to circumstances that are completely out of your control, you’re now unable to accept payment from customers, and your Support Team is getting countless angry calls. 

If this sounds familiar and/or you’d like to avoid this scenario at all costs—you need a backup plan. In payments, this is known as fallbacks, a secondary payment provider that’s put into action when your primary processor’s redundant.

To keep things running smoothly on the frontend, Primer has automated the fallback process. When you set up a new payment route with Workflows, you can choose a fallback processor, so in the event of a failed or declined payment, your backup’s seamlessly put into play. Your customers won’t notice a thing, and you’ll continue to accept payments as usual.

#6. Get expert payment support

Payments are tricky and ever-changing. Most businesses implement payment logic based on conditions set by their Payments Manager, which leaves things open to interpretation and mistakes being made.

The problem with payments is these mistakes aren’t obvious, because they often don’t result in immediate failures that are easy to spot. You’ll only gradually notice them over a long period of time, resulting in far more loss of revenue. 

A great example of this is subscription payments. If something’s wrong with the initial subscription setup, like the customer’s location or payment method, you won’t detect this at least until the next billing cycle. Complicate this further by splitting payments between multiple processors, payment methods and regions—it’s a wonder anything works smoothly to begin with.

You shouldn’t be a payment expert for payments to work. With Primer, these mistakes are eliminated by putting the payment logic firmly in the hands of experts. Primer specializes in payments, and our team has worked with a diverse range of businesses, including some of the biggest brands in the world. We’re here to help you leverage payments to the utmost, so feel free to reach out to us.

#7. Pay attention to the smallest details

Ever heard of marginal gains? Originally coined for Olympic performance cycling, this theory holds true when optimizing for authorization rates. It’s all about small, incremental fixes in a process, which, when added together—amount to significant improvement.

You’re unlikely to find a silver bullet that can boost your auth rates in one fell swoop. Instead, you should focus on optimizing every last detail. When combined, these can result in monumental monetary gains.

We get this, and have developed an observability platform that provides a unified view of your payment data across all processors. With over 40 charts and 35 filters, Primer helps you identify the slightest optimizations for payment success. 

Better still, as you use Primer, you can easily apply changes directly in your payment workflows without waiting for developer resources to become available.

Fraud

You may be wondering why fraud’s a factor of payment success. But if a payment turns out to be fraudulent, you might need to repay the order amount, so it’s best to ensure you’re optimizing this area of the business as well.

Primer has built easy 1-click Connections into multiple fraud services. You can now maintain full visibility into your fraud service and maximize its benefits, no matter which processor you’re using.

#8. Treat customers unequally

The truth is, not all customers are equal. Returning and trusted VIP customers don’t need that extra fraud check. On the other hand, you’ll want more reassurance for that new shopper who’s just added 10 of your highest risk items to their basket.

Protect your business and fight fraud by connecting to one of the many fraud services Primer supports, but don’t let this lead to increased instances of false positives. 

Study and know your customer base. Then, create separate workflow routes based on their risk profiles to add protection where needed, without restricting your trusted customers unnecessarily.

#9. Double up on protection

We’ve talked about the benefits of using 3DS only where required to improve conversion. The same is true for fraud protection. Based on the risk score that’s returned by your fraud provider, protect yourself with some additional security by sending the customer through a 3DS authentication flow.

Usually, this would mean integrating a third-party fraud solution, building conditional logic based on the response, pausing your checkout flow while the test takes place, and resuming the flow with a new 3DS window for riskier customers. Sounds complicated? Now rinse and repeat, for every single sales channel!

With Primer, all you need to do is add this logic right into your workflow, and Universal Checkout will handle the rest. Again, zero code needed.

Your payment flow is one of the most complicated and crucial parts of your business. While immediate gains may be hard to get, by using Primer’s no-code payment automation platform, you can be sure you have all the tools needed to boost your business’ payment success.

Flip the script—do payments right.

Interested in getting more tips on revenue optimization? Get in touch with our team of experts.