New-gen payment solutions have evolved significantly in the last few years, building in an era of online payments. This era is characterized by the emergence of innovative payment methods, cutting-edge infrastructures, and a business strategy to accept payments online. According to a study conducted in 2023, cash usage has lost nearly 20% globally in share of payments over the past five years. New payment methods such as mobile payments, e-wallets, APMs, BNPL solutions, etc. are transforming the payment process into a digital-based form.
Consolidation of all these methods is another issue. In this variety, it is arguable how to build a working strategy to accept payments online. Below, we’ll answer all of the questions on creating a productive payment strategy.
Essentials to Accept Payments Online
Businesses should have an effective payment strategy for several clear reasons: It helps to boost customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and decrease the payment fee cost.
Before delving into the elements of an efficient payment strategy, let’s start with what online payment processing is. In basic terms, it refers to how money routes from your customer to your business. Although this may seem easy, there are many components involved in the process of accepting payments online. You need to consider a variety of elements from the payment options to innovative tools and prices to accept payments online:
Exploring the Components to Accept Payments Online
The Business (Merchant)
The main part of online payment processing is the merchant, who is considered you or your business. However, to accept credit and debit card payments online, you will likely need to partner with one of the many payment service providers such as Klarna, Stripe, or PayPal.
The Payment Service Provider
Payment processors (or payment service providers) handle the transaction through the processing network to send you a billing statement, and then work with your bank to ensure you get paid. In other words, everything it takes to accept payments online.
The Payment Orchestration Platform
One of the technologies in accepting online payment that enables you and your customer to transact is the payment orchestration platform (POP).
The payment orchestration platform plays a critical role in the checkout process. It securely transmits the customer’s payment information from your website to your payment network for processing. Working with a payment orchestration platform can be a game-changer for driving conversions and increasing customer satisfaction based on its technology.
Providing Different Payment Methods
Finally, you’ll need to choose the correct payment methods for your customers. These methods can include credit and debit cards and alternative payment methods (APMs) like digital wallets, mobile payments, and BNPL solutions. You’ll also need to consider which currencies you want to accept payments in.
The online payment ecosystem is specialized day by day and region to region. You may need help analyzing and navigating consumer payment habits in the targeted markets. This is where robust payment technology and deep knowledge become an inevitable requirement that is different from your core business.
This is an important issue because if you plan to accept payments online globally, you’ll need to consider offering overseas-based customers ways to pay in the local payment methods they’re most comfortable with. Klarna, Braintree, Stripe, Adyen, and PayPal, for example, are the most popular payment methods in certain regions.
At Craftgate, depending on the strategic decisions of our merchants, we become their solution partners in the global markets. In this sense, we enable them to directly reach the commonly used payment methods of different regions including Europe, Middle-East or Asia. In addition to reaching global markets, our merchants can also work with the common APMs or BNPL solutions in their targeted markets thanks to our Payment Gateway solution.
You can view the full list of payment methods you can offer with Craftgate here.
Choosing the Most Efficient Payment Orchestration Platform
As an online retailer, your authorization rates may have decreased, and you’re stuck for ideas as to why. Your finance team may need help to follow different payment providers among various dashboards, or your executive team may expect to accept payments online immediately.
If you’ve already encountered these challenges or are proactively trying to avoid them, finally, you have explored a payment orchestration platform.
However, if you’re still uncertain what exactly a payment orchestration platform is and why you should use one, we address these questions in detail in our blog post: What Is Payment Orchestration?
Once you’ve selected the payment processor to accept payments online, you’ll then need to pick the correct payment orchestration platform for your needs.
To simplify this choosing process, you can follow the headlines below:
Does The Platform Provide The Flexibility Your Business Needs?
Each business has different payment needs, so it’s crucial an orchestration platform can adapt to your unique requirements. While the platform must address the critical need to accept online payments, flexibility goes beyond this.
Consider the following:
- Safety & Compliance: Can the platform meet your industry’s specific compliance needs such as PCI DSS Level 1 for card tokenization or data privacy regulations?
- Checkout Experience: Can you localize the checkout experience in a frictionless way for your customers?
- Integration Processes: Does the POP provide both low-code and advanced headless options? And how about ready integrations does it offer, does it offer variety?
- Payment Optimization: Does it offer tools and insights to optimize payment flow for performance, authorization rate, or, cost?
- Dashboard Usage: Is the POP’s UX intuitive, allowing you to build and manage workflows to accept online payment easily?
Ultimately, a POP should not force you to adapt to its limitations while accepting payments online, instead, it should support your execution.
Does The Platform Offer Value-Added Tools To Improve Your Payment Performance?
The main function of a POP is the consolidation of all payment providers, smart payment solutions, and optimized payment routing. However, it should offer more than this. By overseeing all your payment process, it can provide value-added tools to enhance payments and increase revenue, such as:
- Enabling to accept payments online during even the downtimes on the payment providers,
- Unified 3DS experiences across all payment flows,
- Smart and dynamic payment routing to provide cost reduction,
- Providing tokenization in compliance with PCI DSS certification to your customers’ card information under a unique, safe, and unidentifiable network token.
As an online retailer, you should consider using smart payment solutions to accept payments online in today’s world. You can get detailed information on the smart payment tools and why you should use them in our blog post, Smart Payment Solutions for Retail and E-Commerce Excellence.
Does The Platform Offer An Advanced Analytic Advantage?
When evaluating a new POP, it’s not just about the amount of data they have, but the tools they offer to turn that data into actionable insights. Key features to assess include:
- Setting real-time alerts for sudden changes in key performance metrics especially in the authorization rate with proactive monitoring tools.
- Using advanced charts, filters, and advanced merchant panels for detailed data analysis.
Does The Team Behind The Platform Have The Knowledge And Experience In Payment?
Having an expert partner to navigate changes, identify optimization opportunities, and answer questions is priceless in the complex payments landscape. At this point, you need to consider three keystones: product, team, and support.
So, after asking the shortlisted providers about their technology and services, you should also examine their expertise in payment. This helps you to understand what is going to be if you request help for your strategy in different markets.
On the other hand, you should try to understand their approaches on support processes. For example, at Craftgate, a proactive approach in support processes plays a critical role because of the nature of payment.
That’s why our merchants always underline that our support process is distinguished in addition to our deep expertise and product capacity.
As you can see, Craftgate allows you to manage all payment methods from a single panel. Thanks to its payment routing tools, you can save costs. You can also get insights and reports on your online payment processes, including authorization rates, pricing fees, and routing details, which enables you to gain operational advantage and save time.
On the other hand, you can accept payments online even during downtimes on the payment processors which enables you to increase income and customer satisfaction.
Building an Effective Strategy to Accept Payments Online
Before you implement a strategy to accept payments online, you must first build one. So, before diving into specific strategies for improving payment processes, let’s outline the key points for creating a customized list of payment optimization strategies tailored to your unique needs, goals, business model, key markets, and growth opportunities.
Here’s the process:
Evaluate the Landscape to Accept Payments Online
It means assessing your existing payment processes, systems, and technologies. Also means understanding your current challenges, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement to accept payments online. This assessment includes analyzing transaction volumes, payment methods, pricing fees, customer feedback, authorization rate, and any identified security risks or fraud incidents.
Determine the Business Objectives
These may include optimization potentials such as reducing costs, improving customer experience, increasing cash flow, and expanding into new markets. In the end, it’s essential to align your payment optimization strategies with your overall business objectives.
Acknowledge The Key Market Factors
Each market may have distinct payment preferences, regulations, and infrastructure. At this point, you need to be aware of the specific markets where your business currently operates and those you target to expand into. Investigating payment trends, consumer preferences, local payment methods, and legislation requirements help you ease the transactions to accept payments online.
Aim Scalability and Flexibility
You aim to grow as a business. So, anticipating future growth and scalability requirements when designing payment optimization strategies is the key. Evaluate the scalability and adaptability of different solutions to accept payments online when you increase transaction volumes, expand into new markets, and evolve customer needs. Shortly, choose partners that can adjust your growth strategy when you scale up.
Analyze The Best Practices In Your Sector
There must be payment best practices and strategies specifically in your industry. Analyzing those case studies, research reports, and success stories for insights to accept payments online effectively.
Engage Stakeholders
When it is time to accept payments online, different units must be involved in a business operation. So, it is crucial to involve relevant stakeholders, such as finance, IT, operations, customer support, and marketing teams, in decision-making. Gathering their insights, perspectives, and pain points related to payments will help identify opportunities and ensure that the final payment optimization strategies are aligned with the broader organizational goals.
Measure Costs and Benefits
While building a payment strategy, assessing the costs of implementing each payment provider, the processing fee, and the operation burden is critical. Compare these costs against the expected benefits, such as improved customer loyalty and lifetime value (LTV), increased revenue, reduced payment-related costs, and streamlined processes.
Develop an Action Plan
Based on your needs, goals, market factors, industry best practices, stakeholders, scalability requirements, and cost-benefit analysis, you should also have an action plan to execute your strategy. Your action plan must include the specific steps, timelines, responsibilities, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure each strategy’s success.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many things to consider regarding payment.
After we examined the terms “payment processor”, “payment strategy”, “accepting payments online”, “payment gateway”, and “payment routing” the details of the global payment landscape would be confusing.
Here is the good news: you don’t have to know the details because it is not your core business, but ours.
When you choose us as a payment orchestration platform, you don’t even think about how to work with different payment providers, APMs, BNPL solutions both local and global. You also don’t need to struggle with process fees or reporting issues to accept payments online.
In a shortcut, Craftgate provides cost reduction, increased conversion, consolidation, and customer satisfaction in a single point.
Contact us for detailed information about effective strategies to accept payments online.
