5 hidden problems with your payments platform
Are you doing everything you can to streamline payments and improve margins? You can start by examining these five payment system problems you might not even know you have.
Problem #1: Your business could be missing out on new customers.
The way consumers buy is changing. If you’re not offering fast, easy, and consistent checkout, they might go somewhere else. You need lightning-speed load times and a seamless user experience from consideration to purchase. Most of all, you need to offer customers the payment methods they want and trust. More than one in four shoppers has abandoned a shopping cart because their preferred payment method wasn’t available.1
Of course, all those options won’t mean a thing with high decline rates. When was the last time you checked authorisation rates? You could be losing customer trust – and leaving money on the table – with payment auth rates that don’t beat industry standards. Improving them is critical to gaining net new customers and retaining existing customers.
Solution: A payments platform that offers consumers more choices.
Give customers what they want: a quick and easy checkout using their preferred payment method. 59% of U.S. consumers trust unfamiliar businesses more when they offer PayPal.2 And we’re the only payments platform that can offer PayPal, credit and debit cards, and popular digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, all seamlessly integrated into one payments platform.
PayPal can enhance the customer experience even more by improving reliability, processing speed, and authorisation rates. We offer local, cloud-based processing, industry-leading uptime, and real-time payment updates to help increase transaction speed and improve auth rates. Based on a study in 2019, our auth rates are over 90%, beating industry standards by 300+ bps.3 More authorised transactions doesn’t just mean more possible conversions. It could increase customer trust and bring repeat business: 48% of consumers are more likely to return to a business when they have a good payment experience.4
Problem #2: Your payments platform isn’t built to weather uncertainty.
Does your payments platform require multiple integrations in order to work with your tech stack? Is it keeping up with your fast-growing company in the ways it needs to? Maintaining many different integrations will create slowdown at the worst possible times – when you need to pivot to keep up with changing customer preferences and risk tolerances.
Agility is essential to another area, too: maintaining security and customer trust in times of economic uncertainty. Does your payment system provide the agility large enterprises typically need, and help support you through changing circumstances?
Solution: An agile and future-proof payments platform.
Manage your commerce network with a payments platform that lets you activate and deactivate functionalities, systems, and partnerships as needed. PayPal is a fully customisable payments platform that can adapt to your changing needs and grow with your company through every stage of the business life cycle. When you’re able to not only anticipate customer needs, but easily provide solutions, you can position your business to weather political, economic, or cultural shifts that impact consumer buying behaviours.
Problem #3: Your business operations could be more streamlined.
Too many integrations won’t just slow you down and prevent a quick response to a changing marketplace. They may decrease your operational efficiency and increase your costs. One common area with too many integrations is the shopping cart. It might have one checkout button, a separate vendor for credit card processing, another for credit or installment offerings, and another for fraud monitoring. When there’s an issue, it can take hours to figure out the cause. Using a single integration helps you resolve issues faster and at a cost that may be lower than coordinating multiple vendors.
You could also be losing money if you’re not utilizing the latest technology. Does your payments platform help you gain data-based insights and find all possible efficiencies? Does it use network tokenization, webhooks, and data reporting and analytics? The age of Big Data is here: Forrester reports that insights-driven businesses will earn $1.8 trillion by 2021.5 Earn your share of that revenue by leveraging payments data.
Solution: A payments expert with the insights to help drive down costs.
The best payments platforms don’t just process transactions and call it a day. They have powerful tools that help businesses take control of their data and identify areas for improvement. PayPal offers detailed reporting that reveals key trends in transactions, declines, settlement batches, and more. We use the power of webhooks to receive real-time information on events taking place in your gateway and respond to them quickly and effectively. And we use network tokenisation, which can help improve authorisation rates and reduce declines due to invalid credentials and fraud.
Problem #4: Your current platform doesn’t use the latest security innovations.
The financial loss due to credit card fraud alone was $14.7 billion.6 Threats to profits due to fraud, lost sales, compliance issues, and financial damages are very real – and they deserve serious consideration.
Enterprise-level businesses deal with huge amounts of customer data and process high-value transactions daily. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that PCI compliance is all a business may need. It’s more important than ever to have the latest security and fraud protection.
Solution: A robust set of customisable fraud protection tools.
You need a payments partner that’s familiar with security for large businesses. Not every platform is able to deploy the latest solutions for fraud protection, data storage, and third-party integrations – but PayPal can. We can test and deploy rules in real-time to adapt to evolving patterns with advanced machine-learning-based fraud protection. We can help prevent costly card fraud with 3D Secure authentication, and keep transactions secure with network tokenization. Is your current payments platform doing all that?
Problem #5: Scaling into global markets seems complicated and time-consuming.
Every business has the same goal: growth. As the commerce landscape changes, new security requirements and data regulations, many of which are unique to specific countries or regions, can make scaling into new markets seem risky and overwhelming. Yet navigating these challenges is critical for successful business expansion.
Enterprise businesses that operate in the worldwide marketplace often have complex and varied systems to cater to different cultural and regulatory landscapes. But managing disparate systems over many time zones is far from ideal. You need a global partner that can integrate payment types and currencies from every corner of the globe into a single solution.
Solution: Expert support to navigate changing regulatory environments.
Business growth shouldn’t stop within a certain country’s borders. PayPal’s massive network of 400+ million active users can provide business with a global perspective – and our unique relationships with local banks offer expertise in specific markets. Our combination of global scale and local knowledge means businesses can harness growth opportunities like cross-border transactions and local payment methods to expand into new markets with confidence.
Payments platforms can – and should – do more than the bare minimum. The top platforms feel more like business partners, helping you optimise your payment strategy. Take a close look at your current platform and ask: Does it provide a simplified, all-in-one solution that integrates easily with your tech stack? Does it maximise payments performance and increase efficiencies? And can it provide the security and global solutions that today’s enterprise-level businesses need?
Don’t miss out on revenue that’s hiding in plain sight.
Sources:
1 IPSOS study commissioned by PayPal, July–August 2018. Online survey of 1,500 U.S. respondents including 888 PayPal users.
2 IPSOS study commissioned by PayPal, July–August 2018. Online survey of 888 U.S. PayPal users.
3 PayPal commissioned study. Authorization rates benchmarked against major payment networks in US, UK, Australia, France, Spain over 3 months (April–June 2019). Based on first presentment.
4 IPSOS study commissioned by PayPal, July–August 2018. Online survey of 1,500 U.S. respondents including 888 PayPal users.
5 Forrester, Insights-Driven Businesses Set the Pace for Global Growth, October 2018.
6 Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2018, February 2019.
7 Source: https://investor.pypl.com/news-and-events/news-details/2020/PayPal-Reports-Third-Quarter-2020-Results/default.aspx
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