How to increase payment success

Globally, card payments fail 10-15% of the time. In emerging markets, this failure rate is much higher – ranging as high as 40%. Payment failures not only result in immediate lost revenue, but can impact future sales, with 62% of customers opting not to return to a website after experiencing a failed payment. 

The data is clear: payment success matters. Not only does it lead to more collected revenue, but offering a seamless payment experience can become a long term competitive advantage.

In this article, we highlight 5 tried-and-tested ways that business can increase payment success rates. 

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1. Offer more payment methods

When it comes to consumer payment preferences, there is no one-size-fits-all.

Digital payment methods are becoming increasingly prevalent, including digital wallets, buy now pay later solutions, and digitised cash payments. If you choose to offer card or bank transfer only, you’re losing out: 56% of consumers would be “permanently put off shopping on a site” if they couldn’t use their preferred payment method.

Using one payment method or gateway isn’t enough to meet consumer demand. To maximise conversation and success rates, your business must adopt multiple payment methods for customers to choose from. 

However, integrating and maintaining multiple payment methods can be complex – especially with  the rapid pace of change and new innovation. Precium supports more than 30 payment methods through a single API, meaning you can integrate once and let us take care of the rest. We’re constantly adding more payment methods and partners, meaning you can focus on growing your business, while we take care of your payment stack. 

2. Optimise your checkout page

Your checkout page can make or break your conversion rate. Recent data suggests that 24% of customers drop off when a site requires them to create an account and a further 17% abandon their cart because the checkout process was too long. 

Increase your conversion rate by keeping your payment form and process simple. Offer guest checkout, and consider using a one-click payment option for returning customers.

Localisation is also key. Dynamically exposing the most relevant payment methods for customers in their local currency can significantly increase your conversion rate and build trust for future purchases.

3. Implement a failover

Even the best payment processors experience downtime. Unfortunately, in emerging markets, payment failure rates are significantly higher – often due to technical errors and unreliable infrastructure. This can interrupt your trading, leading to lost revenue, fewer repeat buyers, and a wave of angry support calls for circumstances out of your control. 

Your business needs a backup plan. Implementing a failover – or a secondary payment provider – can ensure you continue to collect revenue when your primary provider is down. Precium can configure automated workflows to route payments to a failover. This ensures that when a payment fails or is declined, the transaction is re-routed to a secondary gateway – keeping you and your customers happy. 

4. Use payments data

Most payments data is under-utilised.

Using your payments data to better understand sources of failure can help to significantly increase success rates. For technical or acquirer related failures, businesses can increase payment success rate by routing transactions to PSPs that offer the highest authorisation rates for specific transaction types. This is particularly relevant for businesses operating in different markets, as gateway performance differs substantially per region. 

Precium automatically incorporates this intelligence to route transactions to the gateway likely to generate the highest success rate, based on parameters such as currency, location, amount, and issuing bank. Our platform enables businesses to automatically failover between different gateways and payment methods, and intelligently retry transactions. Our Recovery solutions extend on this capability to deal with customer-related sources of payment failures (such as insufficient funds and expired cards), by intelligently retrying transactions and dynamically engaging customers when payments fail. 

5. Get expert support 

Payments are increasingly complex. Setting up, maintaining, and reconciling many different payment methods across different markets can quickly become unmanageable, requiring specialist skills that you might not always have in house. 

Payment errors are not always easy to detect or diagnose, especially where your business has a recurring billing model. Instead of contacting multiple support centres, let Precium do the hard work of identifying root causes and proactively identifying issues before they occur. Our team has 50+ years of payment and collections experience, and we’re supporting some of Africa’s largest brands and fastest-growing scale-ups to get the most from their payment stacks. 

Payments don’t have to be a cost centre. Done right, you can use payment experiences to differentiate your business, collect more revenue, and keep customers coming back for longer. While there is no silver bullet, Precium can empower you with the tools you need to boost your payment success rate. 

Precium is Africa’s first payment platform purpose-built for enterprise scale. Industry leaders choose Precium to optimise payment performance, automate financial operations, and craft extraordinary customer experiences. Find out how Precium can help you achieve your boldest business ambitions by requesting a sales consultation.