Tag Archive for: ecommerce

What did Black Friday cost you this time?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become the ultimate annual events for both consumers, as well as retailers, who plan for these well ahead of time to ensure it all runs smoothly. 

Grown in popularity over the years, and even more so since the pandemic, bank reports suggested that this year Black Friday transactions were up a staggering 141% compared to a normal trading day. NatWest and Nationwide both reported over 4m transactions by lunchtime on Black Friday, while Barclaycard also recorded 21.4% more purchases compared to 2020.

 

Black Friday transactions were up a staggering 141% compared to a normal trading day

 

Given the significance of these events particularly for the retailers who are trying to recoup post pandemic, there is a distinct pressure for those retailers that will be inundated with soaring eCommerce volumes and the slightest idea of a technical glitch is any retailer’s nightmare. The robustness of your payments gateway and your website/mobile app checkout to accommodate a sheer volume of traffic are probably the most crucial functions when running a  smooth and successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The truth is that outages and downtime can still happen however well-prepared you may be and however advanced you think the technology you are using is. 

We all remember what occurred with Macy’s a few years ago, when they encountered nationwide problems processing payments during the busiest shopping day of the year. Not only did the retailer lose out on thousands in sales but also left a lot of its customers, (including loyal customers) frustrated and unimpressed, which was somewhat damaging and embarrassing for the brand. No business, particularly eCommerce platforms and merchants, that are heavily reliant on online transactions like to think about the implications of a payment gateway outage can have on them and hope that it won’t happen to them, but it is this kind of mindset that can be costly to your business.

Merchants aside, even digital platforms have issues. This year, we saw Revolut battling major Black Friday problems as customers were unable to use their accounts on their mobiles to sign in or make card payments, with at least six of its services being affected by the outage. 

So what do merchants do if this was happening with their primary payments gateway? It’s tough when you rely on payments but can’t take one.

Paydock’s fail-proof feature is a great example of how merchants can overcome this issue. Our technology is built in with a feature that mitigates downtime risk by enabling merchants to fail-over to an alternative gateway when their primary gateway is down. By ensuring their customer’s sensitive payment data is securely stored in our vault, merchants can operate with peace of mind that their business is open for business even when their service providers experience downtime. 

For subscription-based businesses, the impact of a payment gateway outage extends beyond just Black Friday and Cyber Monday as it has multiple, negative implications on their ability to renew subscriptions and sign up new subscribers, affecting their bottom line even more significantly. So how can subscription businesses protect from these outages? Should they be thinking beyond just ensuring that their tech, website and mobile apps are intact? The tricky part is that every business interprets “robust payments infrastructure” in a different way. But the trick is to seek for an infrastructure that is more holistic and maximises your chances of succeeding with minimum effort or cost.

Subscription businesses can benefit from Paydock’s sophisticated recurring engine, this provides autonomous recurring payments across your Paydock-managed payment gateway infrastructure. Among a myriad of innovative features, our engine offers a configurable retry capability, which means that you are in total control of “what happens and how” when a payment fails, how many times you retry, how long between retries, and what happens then.

The more in control you have, the less there is a chance of your business having to bear the cost of any hiccups.

In other words, the more in control you have, the less there is a chance of your business having to bear the cost of any hiccups. Look for an infrastructure that can effortlessly orchestrate all of your payments requirements and processes.

Our clients have been able to plug in hundreds of instances of gateways globally and remain in total control, expand effortlessly into new geographies, currencies, and regions. With easy access to your favourite payment gateways and acceptance services already connected, you can use the gateways that best suit your business needs depending on the phase of business you’re in. Best-of-breed always trumps single-vendor, and we’re here to have your back.

Without a highly scalable, resilient payments infrastructure in place, there is no guarantee your business will survive the pressure of soaring volumes on Black Friday or any other day of the year for that matter. Payments orchestration with Paydock lifts that burden for you and ensures that you won’t be left in the dark for your customers. 

Be prepared for next time.

Want to be prepared for the next big retail event? Get in touch with one of our friendly experts today at [email protected] 

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HSBC Head of Product joins Paydock

Paydock, an enterprise-grade payments orchestration platform appoints Jenela Gunasekaran as its Chief Product Officer. This significant appointment emphasises the increasingly recognised role of payments orchestration as well as Paydock’s leadership in the sector.

Jenela brings over 16 years of experience across product, technology, and financial services to her new role at Paydock. She joins from HSBC where she held the role of Head of Product at its mobile payment service PayMe in Hong Kong for almost three years and led a team of product managers, engineers and tech writers to launch online payments for merchants and numerous distribution models for partners, serving over 2.3 million PayMe consumers.

Prior to her role at HSBC, Jenela spent over five years as Principal Product Manager at PayPal where she was responsible for multiple products focused on minimising seller fraud and credit risk across geographies. In this role, she partnered with global business units and policy makers to create product vision and lead multi-year product strategies and a scalable and robust platform to deliver business positive outcomes for PayPal. 

Commenting on the appointment, Robert Lincolne, founder and CEO of Paydock, said: “We are delighted to be able to attract such high calibre international talent to our team. Innovation sits at the heart of Paydock and our market-leading team, product and services is a testament to this. Jenela’s expertise will undoubtedly add significant value and competitive advantage to our offering. 

Jenela is passionate about creative use of technology to build inclusive and sustainable products. She has vast experience in e-Commerce, Digital Payments, Fraud and Credit Risk, API as a Product and Software Application Life-cycle Management.

Commenting on her appointment, Jenela Gunasekaran said: “With accelerated digitisation and businesses eager to rapidly adapt to changing consumer preferences, Paydock’s payment orchestration is uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role in helping businesses offer fast, secure, reliable, and a cost effective payments experience to their consumers in their preferred mode of payment. I am very excited to join the incredibly talented team at Paydock and I look forward to driving further innovation on the platform.”

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Key Trends In The Growth of Payments In China

China’s eCommerce market is expected to record a compound annual growth rate of 23% through to 2020.

China’s movement from being cash dominated straight to mobile payments has been attributed in part to the late mover advantage. Since China does not have an entrenched credit card culture, the jump from cash to mobile was much easier. Mobile is now accepted as an everyday transaction method.

For businesses wanting to take a share of the options associated with the rise of mobile as a payment method through which to pay, the Chinese market represents a great opportunity. With a phenomenal eCommerce growth rate of 63.2%, mainly as a result of a higher adoption of digital payments initiatives in rural areas and a shift from cash to mobile payments, and around USD$300 billion worth of online sales, China is a formidable market.

Furthermore, with the number of people in China using their phones to pay for goods and services at the point of sale doubling last year, it is expected by 2020 that half of all of China’s smartphone users (an estimated 350 million people) will use mobile payments. Thus, the Chinese commerce market represents a great chance for SMEs wishing to tap into both global expansion (especially Asia) and take advantage of mobile payments.

In particular, the rise of Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay, which are both able to settle transactions in more than 10 currencies and are now in the business of global expansion, represent a great way for businesses to take their first step into the Asian market.

 

Why should you offer mobile payment methods?

Mobile payment platforms can lead to increased consumption not only in eCommerce, but also in offline retail. By integrating online mobile payments with offline purchasing experiences, convenience and overall consumption is increased. This results in additional growth for your business.

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2017 World Payments Report Summary

The World Payments Report reported that global non cash transaction volumes grew 11.2% during 2014-15 to reach 433.1 billion, the highest growth of the past decade, and slightly above last year’s prediction.

Developing nations increased global non-cash transaction share, with two regions in particular fuelling this growth.
Asian countries experienced impressive growth in non-cash transactions across all regions due to an increased adoption of mobile payments and wallets such as Tencent’s WeChat Pay and Alibaba’s Alipay, with a growth rate of 43.4%. This was particularly driven by China’s phenomenal 63.2% growth in non-cash transactions, a result of higher adoption of digital payments initiative in rural areas and a shift from cash to mobile payments among payment service users.
The second highest growth of 16.4% was recorded in CEMEA (Central Europe, Middle East and Africa), recording the highest growth in card transactions and credit transfers in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Poland.
In Australia, contactless payments account for about 70 to 80% of MasterCard and Visa payments.

Debit cards and credit transfers were the leading digital instruments in 2015, while check usage continues to decline globally.

Transaction volumes for all payment methods except cheques increased. Payments by card grew faster than other instruments, an indication of superior convenience and security.
Globally, debit card market share increased to 70.5% while credit card market share dropped from 30.1% in 2014 to 26.5% in 2015.
In Australia, almost 70% of credit card transactions are contactless, and there has been notable growth in volumes of credit card, but also of scheme debit card transactions.

Despite the increased adoption of digital payments, cash continues to be in the mainstream, especially for low value transactions.

Cash is the main method of payment for smaller purchases such as food, personal care supplies, general merchandise and gifts. It is also used in peer to peer transfers despite the increasing popularity of money transfer apps such as Venmo and PayPal.
Key factors contributing to the persistency of cash include the anonymity associated with cash transactions, lack of a modern payments infrastructure, and limited or no access to the banking system in developing markets.
In Australia, cash in circulation remains steady at around 4-5% of GDP.

The World Payments Report can be accessed here.

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How to Combat Cart Abandonment Rates Effectively

According to Statista, the global average cart abandonment rate for the second quarter of 2016 was 74.52%. This means that out of 100 potential customers, 75 are leaving for reasons such as “extra costs too high”, “the site wanted me to create an account” and a “too long/ complicated checkout process”. Yet, the high cart abandonment rate is no cause for despair. Approximately 63% of abandoned sales is potentially recoverable by savvy online retailers.

 

So how can merchants reduce the cart abandonment rate?

  1. Offer free shipping. Savvy online consumers are looking for ways to save money. If you are unable to offer free shipping completely, promotions such as “Free shipping for orders over $75” or even making shipping costs clear and upfront have been shown to increase sales.
  2. Create a guest checkout process. Shoppers are reluctant to provide private information upfront, but are happy to create an account after they have purchased a product to track shipping and delivery times.
  3. Reduce the amount of steps taken to checkout. Conversion studies have shown that the less clicks to checkout there are, the lower the cart abandonment rate. If many pages are needed, it is a good idea to provide a progress bar or another visual indicator.
  4. Improving the security of transactions. Adding a security logo such as Symantec can increase sales by up to 42%
  5. Increasing the amount of payment methods. Offer common payment processes such as PayPal, VISA, MasterCard, AMEX, as well as alternate payment methods (APM). APMs (such as E-wallets and mobile payment methods, transfers, digital currencies etc.) will account for more than half of all transactions by 2017, up from 43% in 2012. In a time where payment methods are becoming increasingly varied and complex, online merchants risk losing sales if they are unable to offer their customer’s preferred method.

 

How can Paydock help?

We aren’t saying that we can offer all solutions to high cart abandonment rates, but Paydock can definitely increase conversion rates by connecting your e-commerce store to multiple payment gateways and allowing access to new payment methods. We allow you to future proof your payments ecosystem in a time of rapid change and development.  

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