Many e-commerce merchants experienced stellar growth during the pandemic. During periods of expansion like this, consumer spending helps to fuel merchant investment in digital transformation to enhance the customer experience. But more challenging macroeconomic conditions call for greater scrutiny of spending. When every dollar counts, those same merchants will often pivot to focusing on optimizing their operations.
Fortunately, there are many ways to accomplish these goals, particularly when it comes to lowering transaction expenses and tackling checkout experiences which may cause cart abandonment. In fact, PayPal Braintree has several features which could help with both.
The market has evolved in recent years. Today’s consumers increasingly expect smooth, seamless checkout experiences with minimal distractions. Merchants want this too, because issues like failed transaction attempts and excessive latency can lead to cart abandonment and ultimately lost sales. PayPal Braintree tools like Account Updater and Intelligent Retries can help to drive conversions. Here's how:
Account Updater tools (Batch Account Updater, American Express Card Refresher, Visa Real-Time Account Updater, and Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater): These ensure cards stored in a merchant’s Braintree vault are always up to date. How? By using an online push or offline pull model, they receive updates from card issuers following lifecycle management events such as lost, stolen or expired cards. The end result is that customers don’t have to update card details themselves at checkout. This could reduce declines and latency, enhances the overall checkout experience and helps merchants capture more revenue.
Intelligent Retries: While merchants should focus on getting transaction approvals on the first try, retries do offer an alternative which could help to maximize profits. This tool uses machine learning to intelligently predict the best retry strategy based on which card is being used, as well as other parameters including issuer, merchant, processor and acquirer combination, and even day and time. By optimizing payment acceptance, it can help to drive revenue without impacting the customer experience.
Transaction expenses also tend to come under greater scrutiny during challenging macroeconomic conditions. PayPal Braintree’s network tokenization and 3DS options can help:
Network tokenization: A cryptographic token is used to replace the 16-digit primary account number (PAN) found on all payment cards. Each token is specific to a particular merchant and it can be dynamically updated in real time if lost or stolen, or if it expires. There are several benefits. It can help to reduce security and fraud risk, because only the token rather than the underlying PAN is stored and sent by the merchant. And it can help to increase authorization, because even if an underlying PAN is changed because a card has to be reissued, the token is dynamically updated and remains usable. From a transaction expense perspective, merchants who use network tokens might benefit from reduced interchange fees as some card networks charge more for non-token transactions.
3D Secure (3DS) and Rules Manager: 3DS has for years delivered two-step authentication for buyers, by adding an extra layer of security to online transactions. In so doing, it can help to shift liability and reduce the merchant costs associated with chargebacks. Introduced after new EU payment rules were passed, the latest version of the protocol (3DS2) also helps merchants in the region to meet the directive’s Secure Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements more seamlessly.
Braintree’s 3DS2 solution is simple to integrate and allows merchants’ customers to use their phone to authenticate, reducing friction. Additionally, Rules Manager gives merchants the option to create business-specific 3DS rules according to their risk tolerance. For example, some may prioritize a frictionless checkout by using as many SCA exemptions as possible, while others want to maximize the liability shift by directing customers to step-up authentication checks more frequently. There are also pre-configured settings, reducing developer toil at the backend. Merchants can quickly implement their chosen rules based on location.
Organizations on average lose $3.7m annually to fraudulent online transactions, according to PayPal research.1 Tackling fraud is vital not only to minimize these losses but also to avoid customer turnover.
Fraud Protection Advanced: This PayPal Braintree tool helps merchants make more accurate decisions on card transactions in real time, in order to reduce false positive rejections and decrease chargebacks. It does this by capturing multiple data points from customer devices and transactions and applying leading-edge machine learning to provide more accurate fraud scores. By using the latest APIs and SDKs, merchant customers can ensure they’re on the latest integration, to optimize fraud protection and the checkout experience.
These are challenging times for merchants. But PayPal Braintree is here to assist as your indispensable e-commerce partner, by focusing on the pain points that matter. From network tokenization and Account Updater tools to Fraud Protection Advanced, we strive to deliver a more seamless and secure checkout experience—optimizing payments, reducing transaction expenses and monitoring for fraud. PayPal Braintree is the all-in-one payments engine designed to modernize the checkout, for today and tomorrow.
Learn more about how PayPal is helping merchants address enterprise payment processing.
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