ONLINE PAYMENTS 2017

For many of us the first months of every new year are the time for making various summaries, resolutions and decisions that are supposed to make both – our private and business lives a resounding success.

While we’re still in the early stages of 2017, let’s consider: is there anything more that can be done to make your online payment processing work more smoothly? And, if you are making your first steps in that direction, how can you implement online payments in the most reasonable manner?

Important Things When Paying Online

Have a look at our little round-up and see if there is anything more that you could do for your online business this year. Maybe it’s time to introduce some changes?

1. Available payment methods

The rule of the thumb here is to make all in one’s power to acquire knowledge about the client’s methods of choice. If you know how your customers pay, stick to these options. You don’t have to use every method possible. What you need is such a way of accepting money that will make your target group happy.

2. Available currencies

Again: look at your customers’ habits. What are their preferred currencies? What did they choose to use on their bank accounts? How are their resources located? Always make it easy for the client to pay. It is, simply speaking, the most reasonable solution to accept money in your client’s national currency.

3. Using API for checkout

Do you want your online shop or SaaS to look more professional? The best way to improve things quickly is to ensure that your customers don’t have to leave your website when they initiate a payment. You can do this by implementing provider’s API on your webpage. Thanks to that, the checkout process will be seamless and will improve the entire customer experience.

4. The possibility of implementing payments in mobile applications

You have an awesome app? Great! Are you wondering what would make it even better in the future? The answer is: implementing a payment option in it. The gateway, like in the previous case, is an API that is responsible for charging customer’s payment card. This way the provider handling your merchant account starts to process the payment seamlessly and fast.

Here’s how we do mobile payments at MAMBO WALLET?

5. Responsive payment forms

With all of the various devices available today, it’s important that your payment forms are easy to use and presentable on every one of them, whether it’s a smartphone or a tablet, or a laptop, and so on. In short – it’s important that the forms are responsive. If a form adapts easily to every type of display screen, the clients will use it more enthusiastically and the checkout process will always be a good experience for them.

You may think that creating such a form is problematic and troublesome. Well, actually, it’s not! Usually you don’t have to waste your time and resources on building and then customizing a form. There are ready templates, some are even provided by the companies processing payments. They don’t require coding, all you need to do is to edit the products and fields. Easy as that!

6. Recurring payments

Recurring billings exist to collect fees from your clients’ cards automatically. Customers choose this option to rest assured that they won’t lose the access to a service by forgetting to pay on time. It’s automated and easy to use. Membership fee payments, services, access to news sites, power bills… There are lots of mundane, repetitive payments that you can easily tackle by using a subscription model.

The most popular payment option is a monthly one, but there are many other possibilities; if your business model requires so, you can collect money every two weeks, annually etc.

You can also charge for actual usage (pay-per-use services). In this case the funds are collected after the client reaches a certain sum of money by using your product.

In both cases the billing system charges the clients automatically, so there’s no need for them to fill out the form for every transaction, even if they choose to upgrade/downgrade their plans or packets.

7. Single click payments

Single Click, also called single-click buying, is a method that allows an online shopper to make a purchase with a single click, using the previously provided billing and shipping information, stored in the system. This way your clients can buy products without the necessity to renew the payment by manually filling out the form during every purchase. It sure saves a lot of time. And typing.

8. Your dedicated transaction descriptors

User experience is still as important in 2017 as it was in 2016. Which means, among other things, that every transaction should be easy to identify on a client’s card/account statement. This is precisely what transaction descriptor is for. It usually contains information about a particular payment, helps to identify transactions and, if the description is properly optimized, helps to prevent chargebacks. It’s mainly because the better readability helps to avoid misunderstandings and allows the customers to recognize every transaction easily .

When you choose your transaction descriptors, you go for static or dynamic ones. The static descriptor is set for all payments charged by a particular merchant, while the dynamic transaction descriptor is used to describe products and services (and one merchant can have various descriptors of this type).

9. API for integration of payments with other services and websites

The service usually doesn’t end with just a pure exchange of the payment for the product with the use of PSP services (like ours at PayLane). If your service is more complicated and includes, for instance, creating an invoice in an accounting SaaS, adding information about the client to a SaaS CRM or a contact e-mail address to an email marketing SaaS system, or, let’s say… ordering flowers in a flowershop SaaS, you need to make all of this possible by merging each of these processes via API.

10. Dedicated payment links

When clients order a product or a service, there is an option available to send them a payment link via email. The message contains the payment and customer data, descriptions of the products that are being bought, the quote of the transaction being made etc.

By clicking the link in the message (or on an invoice) the client is able to make a quick payment.

Make This Year Count

The factors mentioned above are what sums up creating an overall experience when paying and accepting money online.

How many of them have you used or considered using up till now?

Are there some other areas you’d like to improve in your payment system?

Whatever the answer may be, we want to wish you all the best on your way to develop even better processes for your online business this year.

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