Why talking about online payments?

Boring. I think it’s what you have thought after reading the title. But, keep reading, I think you’re wrong.
In this article, I’ll talk about an e-commerce startup, a Geek GIRLS event and the current payment tools in China.
I told you, I hate being boring. 😀

Payments are very important for a successful e-commerce website

So, how to make your e-commerce successful?
Thanks to my experience at Moorbi, I can tell you should focus on 3 main things:

• Branding strategy: make sure you have a determined value proposition and a branding strategy, to picture your company on customers mind. You need to be reliable and distinguished yourself from the mass!
• Customise people’s experience: it’s all about analytics and target audience. You have to reach an audience, create particular offers and help your customers to come back and then buy again. So, forget about social media and paid campaigns and focus on your website before!
• Online Payments: this is the most delicate part of the journey so expect a lot of drop-offs if:  the whole experience is not integrated with the rest of the website. And don’t forget about people’s payment habits.

And here my post: how do you know what people’s payments habits are? Well, this is quite tricky, especially because:
1) it really depends on our culture, sensations, ecc…
2) every day there are new payment solutions.

The future of online payments meetup

So, last week I’ve been to a meetup organised by Geek Girls to learn more about it!

All Saints’ and Badoo people were awesome giving us a lot of tips and suggestions to improve the customer’s experience when it’s related to online payments.

For example, I did learn that adding a new payment option, Paypal or Amazon payments to your e-commerce website could terrifically increase your conversion rate (a 34% rise)! In fact, as I was saying before, customers behaviour depends on a lot of habits so if people see their favourite payment option, it will be easier for them buying your items. Also, comparing a few options you’ll find out that the time it takes to make a purchase is really making a difference [thanks to Christiane Binder for these great insights!]

If you’re serving a global market, you should understand that performances and habits are really different: there are countries where mobile payments are not a trustworthy method.  In fact, even if mobile platform revenues have overtaken the Web, but payouts and flows are still very poor.

Finally, to have a better idea of how culture has a huge impact on this topic we digitally went to China to learn more about payment methods there. And well, Monica Chien‘s speech was very impressive!
Do you know that before making business in China you should become friends and people are easily adding you on Wechat?
So, people using online payments are 20yrs old, they’re using 3rd parties features for personal financing planning reasons (P&L accessible anytime).
Also, they mainly used online payments to send money to their parents in the countryside.
Payments gateways are mainly driven by 3 key players: Alipay, Tenpay and 3rd parties tools.

Finally..what’s the future of online payments? Well, for sure integrating those tools within a B2b environment, for example using Alipay to pay salaries. Are we so far away from this scenario?
Or, how about selfies? Nope, I’m not getting crazy, don’t you think that facial recognition could be an interesting option to reduce fraud losses? Check out this article and let me know what you think!