Transformation of Online Payment Solutions in the Era of Mobile Commerce

Mobile commerce, more commonly known as m-Commerce is the next development in the world of E-commerce. More than half of the world’s internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Reports show that a whopping 62% of smartphone users shop on their mobile devices. This means the competition amongst online payment solutions now stiffens. The potential for growth in this market is huge. All that is needed now is easy-to-use options which will not be a hassle for mobile users.

Online Payment Solutions

Being a part of this payments industry, you need to be well-prepared. You must update yourself on features that will help you beat competition and provide better service to your customers.
Here’s a list of the top 3 trends you should keep an eye out for if you offer online payment solutions in this era of m-Commerce:

• Web Payments :
  A major reason for the shift to mobile devices for shopping is ease and saved time. One could easily login through their mobiles, quickly sift through the website and make a purchase. At this purchase stage, the user hates filling up lengthy forms. They are regular buyers. Their buying experience becomes easier if they don’t have to fill the same mundane data points time and again. This is where web payments come in. Through web payments, the browser native UI can easily autofill all the previously filled data through the Payment Request API. This saves the time and effort spent by the user during the checkout and payment process.
• Faster operations :
  E-Commerce brands today, need better efficiency, greater control, and less reliance on the developer, according to Dan Conboy, MD, Shopify Plus Partner. They require quicker and leaner operations which will help them scale better. Online payment solutions also have to live up to this trend and help brands go live with online payment gateways without hassles on the technical and documentation side.
• Flexible payment options :
  You must have heard about or used the LazyPay option offered by Swiggy, right? What an amazing flexible payment option! You don’t have to spend time filling in your card or bank details. 3 clicks – add to cart, checkout, and pay through LazyPay – that’s all you need. Flexible payment options like these help you to increase the transaction rates as users won’t cancel the purchase just because the card did not work or they’ve forgotten their password their accounts.

We see the latest trends that have been transforming the payment industry thanks to mCommerce. The best payment gateway for e-commerce industry now would be the one which adapts to these changing times and adopts all these latest trends to be relevant. If you are looking to give your competitors a tough time, don’t forget to evolve and become better.

How to Retain Your Customers with an Online Payment Solution

Did you know you need to pay five times more the price to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one? Another study about customer retention states that a 5% increase in retention rate can boost profits by 25% to 95%. If you want to save costs and boost profits, it is time to build a strategy to retain customers and build a strong relationship with them. And one of the most effective ways to do this is by investing in a good payment gateway. Want to know how to boost your customer retention rate with an online payment solution? Keep reading to learn more.

1. Keep a simple registration process
Today, many online retailers make it mandatory for customers to register before making a purchase. This is where customers need to enter their name, surname, gender, PAN number, bank account number and many other details.
Because of this long process, customers might just drop the thought of making a purchase. To avoid this, keep the registration process simple. Invest in an online payment solution that supports quick onboarding.

2. Create an option to repeat orders
Don’t you like the idea of buying something at just one click? With this option, you won’t have to worry about browsing and looking for the right type, size and colour ever again. Imagine, the time your customers can save! This feature also encourages them to keep coming back to you.

3. Bid farewell to long call centre queues
An individual comes to your online store, makes a purchase and holds the phone for hours to know about the status of his order. Does your customer journey look like this? It is time to change it right away. This is because it hampers your customer satisfaction rate.
Instead of a call centre, address customer issues through email or social media accounts. For this, you can invest in a payment solution that comes with social media plugins. Thanks to this option, your team can address issues anywhere and anytime.

4. Send customised emails
The customer journey does not end when an individual makes a purchase. To encourage your customers to return to your online store, build a relationship with them. To do this, you can send out personalised emails. Whether you want to wish them a ‘happy birthday’ or enquire about their abandoned purchase, you can send emails for almost everything. Sending personalised emails shows your customers you value them.

5. Create a referral programme
Customers believe what other customers have to say. One of the studies states that customers are four times more likely to buy when referred by a friend. Hence, invest in a referral programme. One way to create an attractive referral programme is by offering an incentive to your existing customers.
For example, offer a discount to your customer when his referral makes the first purchase. This will encourage your current customers to refer your business to others and keep coming back for interesting offers.
From helping you make a simple registration process to creating a referral programme, one of the payment solutions in India can be your answer to a strong customer retention rate. If you are eager to encourage your customers to keep coming back, check out Easebuzz. This is an online payment gateway in India that aims to make payment simple for businesses.

Important Security Measures for Online Businesses

Cyber-security is indispensable due to the increasing data breaches payment gateways are facing. Taking necessary security measures is critical to protect both consumers and the business.

Data breaches not only pose security risks, but hold the potential to adversely impact your business due to loss in customer trust.

An online payment gateway is among the vital components of an e-commerce store, because of which no stone should be left unturned in the cyber-security department.

As a merchant, the responsibility to have the purchasing process under control so that risk is reduced at every step of a checkout lies on you. Data thieves’ are always one step ahead with regard to how new technologies function. This makes it imperative to strictly minimize the vulnerable points of your online payment gateway.

Even though technology is developing rapidly, keeping up with these changes to completely prevent fraud is a herculean task.  Thankfully, there are warning signs you can look for to minimize the occurrence of such activities.

Following are some ways to safeguard your business from cybercrime:

1. Monitor orders before shipping

This includes international orders as well. While this could be a time consuming process in the long run it will save you money.  Getting a signature upon delivery is another good way of checking that the order has been delivered to the right person. Pay particular attention to late night and early morning orders, as it’s the time period fraudsters often make purchases.

2. Avoid Using HTTP

Make sure the merchant login page is not in HTTP. If you use a web page that is in HTTP you make your page vulnerable to many kinds of security threats. Redirecting users to fake login pages, changing important details on the page in the middle of a transaction and submitting data are possible in HTTP. To avoid such dangers, most login pages are in HTTPS format which is very secure.

3. Using HSTS

HSTS stands for HTTP Strict Transport Security. It can be understood as a type of a header that directs a browser to HTTPS whenever a particular site is opened.

Once the user visits the site that has been preloaded with HSTS, he is unable to get access to the site using HTTP ever again in the future.

4. Using Secure Cookies

Cookies might sound harmless, but they shouldn’t be taken for their face value. Cookies must be marked as secure so that the browser can transfer cookies when the request is in HTTPS. Secure cookies will prevent the browser from transmitting data whenever the site is in HTTP. By doing so, even if a hacker has access to your cookies he will be unable to control sensitive data and make any problematic changes.

The best online payment gateways in India ensure they have strong safety measures in place to protect your business from the rising cyber-crime, so make sure you choose one that offers the highest degree of security.

Life-cycle of Digital Payments for a Card Payment Gateway

The concept of digital payments was born out of convenience and control for consumers. It is only natural for this concept to be consumer-centric as in all markets the consumer is king. Today we will take a closer look at the complex process of digital transactions in a card payment gateway that make life so easy for us. The gateway is a piece of technology through which several merchants and platforms are able to connect from the website to their customers’ mobile devices.

Verification

Once on the other side of the payment gateway, vendors ensure the transaction and consumer behind the transaction is legitimate. Vendors verify details by matching shipping and card addresses, CVV code, blacklisting for credit card default, and IP address. These checkpoints are essential to protect merchants from unnecessary and avoidable costs.

Involvement of Banks

After all the verifications are made, payment requests are routed to the customer’s issuing bank and the merchant’s acquiring bank. Funds are exchanged between these two parties. The card payment gateway sends the initial transaction request to the merchant’s acquiring bank, in response to which this bank requests a payment from the customer’s bank via the payment gateway. When communicating with the customer’s bank, payment gateways run a series of fraud prevention measures. The message of a declined transaction is relayed by the gateway to the customer through the merchant and all in a matter of microseconds.

Settlements

If things have flowed smoothly till this point, the merchant sends a ‘settlement request’ which is a way of confirming their action of charging the customer’s issuing card.

Bill Splitting

Some payment gateways even have an option to divide funds between sellers and facilitating platforms and maintain individual ledgers to do so.

All digital payments through payment gateways follow this cycle. A card payment gateway that stands apart is one that is reliable, secure, scalable, and offer tech-support. Easebuzz is one such platform that enables quick and easy payments end-to-end for upcoming businesses across India.

Top Payment Trends in the Digital Landscape

India has experienced some amazing shifts in the digitisation of payments over the last two years. Demonetisation brought about a strong impetus for consumers to switch to cashless methods of payment. 

There has been an increase in adoption of digital instruments which have been aided by a rise in merchant outlets, and proliferation of UPI which has simplified money transfer to banks. 

Merchants accepting card payments have increased by twice as many coming to about 3 million merchants with the number of UPI transactions rising up to 250 million in June 2018.

What’s interesting is that a major portion of the activity in digital payments has been led by non-banks. E-wallets and payment gateways in India have gained significant prominence. Digital payments are expected to evolve rapidly in the next few years to overtake cash spending by 2020. 

Below are the top 5 trends that will drive this change:

1. UPI

The technology underlying UPI enables instant payments from one bank account to another and is path-breaking. Users are often inconvenienced when they have to log into websites or apps VPAs. Third party providers who offer payment apps on top of UPI using open APIs make this process convenient and almost invisible. This enables many consumers to access UPI and use it for peer-to-peer payments.

2. QR code

With the use of the QR code technology for digital payments at merchant outlets, the need for expensive EDC (electronic data capture) machines or NFC (near-field communication) devices is eliminated. This improves the economics of merchant acquiring. A rise in merchants accepting non-cash payments is expected owing to this advantage. Mobile phones will be the device of choice for payments using QR codes. Traditional acquiring models will get disrupted, and new-age acquirers will offer value added services to merchants in order to make acquiring business economically viable.

3. Zero transaction fees

Government incentives and competitive forces are driving the economics of payment transactions to a decline. The RBI (Reserve bank of India) has capped merchant discount rates for debit card transactions at 0.4%. Most fintech firms are giving their payments services for free. This downward trend is expected to continue and will lead to payments being offered for free with players looking to monetize data through sale of other financial and non-financial products.

4. Cybersecurity

With greater focus being placed on customer acquisition and driving adoption of digital payments, risk management and fraud control haven’t been as stringent as they should be. Cyber-attacks have been reported to have caused alarming financial damages of more than $500,000 to Indian companies in the last 12 months alone.

It is imperative for digital payments players to embrace new technologies like biometric authentication, AI, ML and pattern matching for real-time fraud prevention for digital payment transactions.

5. Payments space

A large number of new players have ventured to join the space of payment gateways in India in the last couple years. Some of them offer niche solutions. From the perspective of consumers ubiquity is important, as they look for instruments that can be used for both purposes online and offline.

This space is expected to witness consolidation with a few large players dominating the market in the coming years.

Benefits of having an online payment gateway with UPI

Unified Payment Interface (UPI) is among the most advanced method of payment among all the options available for digital commerce.

This payment mechanism allows instant money transfers without bank details. It does so using a virtual payment address.  In this article we look at the benefits of UPI:

1. Cheapest Way of Money Transfer

UPI is the most economical method for fund transfer. The nominal charges make UPI a strong way to promote non-cash transactions of small amounts.

2. Secure

UPI minimizes and mitigates cyber security concerns. Since bank details and information isn’t requires for payments using UPI the risk of them being hacked is eliminated. Also the authentication takes place at your smartphone. The level of security is increased by using two different PINs. You can easily make it discrete while typing at your smartphone.

3. One UPI App Many Accounts

When you use an online payment gateway that has UPI as a feature, you no longer need multiple apps for different bank accounts. A single UPI can be used to access many bank accounts.

4. COD Without Paying Cash

About 80% people choose the option of cash on delivery while shopping online. Behind this choice lies a simple apprehension about being delivered the wrong product. Also for expensive purchases you may not always have cash on hand or an ATM nearby. UPI puts an ends to this hassle. With UPI you can choose the COD option without actually paying in cash and using the instantly UPI fund transfer. Of course the merchant should be using the UPI fund collection facility as well.

5. Immediate Payee Registration

Usually a waiting period is required before you can make transfers to a new payee online. This time could be from half an hour to up to 48 hours. UPI requires no waiting time, so an online payment gateway with this feature is the most preferred choice for e-commerce businesses.

Owing to the many advantages relating to cost, efficiency, ease for customers, and highly secure nature of transactions that UPI brings, it is the most coveted feature ecommerce owners look for while choosing an online payment gateway. If you are in search of a payment provider for your online business or are looking to change from your existing one, take care to check for the UPI feature before you finalize your decision.

Signs That You Need a New Payment Gateway

If you have any kind of online business, the payment provider you choose is one of your most important partners. It is an indispensable interface between you, your customers, and your bank and allows safe, convenient, and timely transactions between you and your customers.

Seeing the significance of your payment gateway partner keeping its performance in check is necessary. Keep a keen eye to check for any of the following signs that reflect whether your payment provider is benefiting or costing your business:

Sign #1: Not enough payment options
Customers like to have more than one payment option. With the level of distrust around online transactions still not vanquished, more payment options help instill trust in customers towards your offering. Credit cards, debit cards, and direct bank transfers are major payment methods in the market that customers expect from you if not more.

A good payment gateway should not only offer all three payment methods, it should also be easy to use for you as the merchant. Steer clear from gateways that require you to create or log in to more than one account, or download multiple reports. Concise, comprehensible, easy to access information about every transaction through your gateway should be stored in one central location, from where it can be downloaded and interpreted easily.

Sign #2: Customers need to register twice through your payment gateway

Greater the number of hoops your customer has to jump through to complete a purchase, the more likely they are to leave halfway. If your website requires your customers to register before they can start shopping, they might grumble a little but most of them will stick with you. Asking them to register a second time before they actually make the payment can be problematic. You want to choose a payment gateway that makes the entire purchase process easier, not more complex.

Sign #3: Expensive or weak fraud protection
A number of specialist fraud protection services exist but they are quite expensive and time-consuming to run. You want to partner with a payment gateway that offers affordable and easy to use fraud protection. This isn’t something you can risk ignoring as its one of the most important measures you can take to protect yourself against fraud. Ensure your gateway safeguards you from credit card fraud.

Ultimately it comes down to customer focus: As an online retailer, you want the effort you put into making your site experience a memorable, one that pays off.  If that effort is undermined because of your key partners it’s time to make some important changes. If you’re in search of a new partner, visit Easebuzz at <link>, one of the best options for a payment gateway India has.