Optimising the payments checkout – Best practices from Wargaming.net

Here are four ground rules that any ecommerce business needs to follow, regardless of the industry, to make their customers happy with UX and keep their conversion on a good level:

Make it simple. There is nothing more complex than simplicity. Therefore, building your checkout page with the minimum mandatory fields for your customer to fill in is not an easy job. On one hand, a company needs to collect enough data from customers for further usage in fraud protection and authorisation processes. On the other hand, the fewer fields – the higher the conversion rate. Merchants need to find a good balance between data appetite and conversion rate, depending on their industry specifics. 

Another simplification to consider is the layout of the checkout page.  Regardless of whether it is your page, or you are hosting it from your payment provider, make sure the positioning and subsequence are intuitive, with a focus on mandatory fields to complete the purchase. 

Make it invisible. There should be no difference in design and language between the shop page where your customers choose the item and the checkout page where they pay for it. Thus, make sure the localisation and customisation are done properly, especially if there is a redirect onto HPP. Customers should not feel any change when redirected onto a checkout page, as if they are still within your e-shop. Exception may be when your brand is not that known yet, and the targeted audience has a good trust in your B2C payment provider, thus keeping the partner’s source colours and design on the checkout page will bring you much benefit in the initial stage. 

Make it smart. Be a Sherpa to your customers in their payments journey:

• on the checkout page, give your card payer some pointers about possible settings they need to do with the card before paying online (applicable for cross-border transactions), or about the impossibility to pay with a specific BIN, scheme, or currency prior they press the Pay button. By doing so, they will be able to avoid predictable payment failures;

• implement symbols limitation for the fields as required by the method, use auto switch from one field to another, and provide a prefilled template in the grey fields, to reduce the possibility of user error;

• tokenize your payers, giving them the possibility to pay quickly without the need to enter the details every time they want to buy.

Make it responsive. Last but not the least, make sure your CS service is on a high level. If, in the end, your customers cannot complete the payment, they need to know the reason to avoid it further. Thus, making it clear how to contact CS who can explain possible issues or setting up a readable and logical FAQ is a must. 

This article was first published in Payment Methods Report 2022, the most updated overview of trends and developments in the payment methods space and the innovative technologies that these methods work upon, emerging consumers habits, and strategies on how to win at conversion and retention.

Elena Emelyanova, Senior Payments and Fraud Manager, Wargaming.net