Optimise your mobile payments: 5 best practices
Create a mobile payment experience your customers will love.
Whether we want to book accommodation, order a taxi, or listen to music, we reach for our smartphones. Mcommerce has grown from 5% to 53% in the past five years. But mobile conversions are typically 9% lower than on desktop, which suggests that businesses are still falling short with their mobile user experience. Read on for practical steps and real-life examples to help you create a mobile payment experience that your customers will love.
Get cards right with personalisation
Today customers want an experience tailored to them. They want past orders and delivery details to be remembered, and they don’t want to enter card details more than once.
Tokenize cards for one-click payments
Make it easy for repeat shoppers to pay by letting them pay with one-click. This is possible with mobile payment tokenization, which lets you capture and reuse card details via an encrypted token - so you don’t have to worry about storing sensitive payment data (or PCI compliance).
Payments with a single click or tap are possible using local methods too. In Germany, you can take the initial payment with Sofort and subsequent payments using SEPA Direct Debit.
Personalised checkout flows for all mobile payment methods
You can even serve up a targeted list of mobile payment options based on a customer’s location, or the apps they’ve installed.
Below you can see how one checkout app adapts to different customers:
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Accept mobile wallets
Mobile wallets are purpose-built to make smartphone payments easy. They’re growing steadily, but consumer adoption still varies in each market.
In Asia, Chinese shoppers increasingly expect to pay with Alipay or WeChat Pay - even for high-value items. While in Western markets, Apple Pay and Google Pay dominate.
Apple Pay
Apple Pay was introduced in 2014 and is accepted in major English-speaking markets like the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. It’s a secure method with high authorisation rates.
Google Pay™️
Google Pay supports cards online transactions from 60+ countries and in-store payments from 19+ countries. Android has 80% smartphone market share worldwide.
Samsung Pay
Samsung Pay is available for point of sale only. Unlike the other wallets, it has the functionality to pay on terminals that aren’t enabled for NFC.
Alipay
Alipay has 520+ million users and a 50% share of China’s mobile payments market. It’s accepted in 8 million stores across China and 80k stores worldwide. The Alipay app has a wealth of customer data that can be used to send targeted location-based messages to shoppers.
WeChat Pay
WeChat Pay is part of social network WeChat, which has 938 million monthly users, spending 90 minutes per day in the app. It’s not just a payment method, it’s a sales and marketing channel. And customers can buy from your WeChat-hosted store.
"With Adyen, BlaBlaCar can provide a consistent experience across any device. Whether the user is paying in the native app, or via a mobile browser, the checkout has been designed to delight the user and drive conversions on any screen size. And, as all payments feed into the same system, BlaBlaCar can see transactions across all devices in a single view." - Amelie Seguret, BlaBlaCar
Support local mobile payment methods
The global payments landscape is fragmented. Cards dominate in markets like the US the UK, and Australia. But local mobile payment options are vital for reaching customers across Europe and Asia. For example:
- In China, Alipay and WeChat Pay have a combined share of 94% of mobile payments.
- In the Philippines less than 50% have a bank account and e-wallets like GCash and SmartMoney are popular.
- In the Netherlands iDEAL accounts for over 60% of online payments. And 23% of these were on mobile.
"To create a successful mobile app, you need to make payments as seamless as possible, have flexible APIs and be transparent. Customers should know exactly what to expect." - Michael Cheah, Fave
Use smart authentication
Media coverage of online fraud has made consumers wary of sharing payment information. 3D Secure helps to keep fraud under control and shifts the liability to the card schemes. But it must be used with care. Simply turning it on for all transactions could kill your conversions in some markets. The trick is to use it dynamically.
The latest version of 3D Secure (part of Europe's PSD2 regulations) will include SDKs to build authorisation flows in-app and use token-based biometric authentication. This eliminates the redirect and lets customers authenticate themselves with a fingerprint, instead of having to remember another password.
"The fluidity and simplicity of the customer journey is a key challenge in building the perfect online experience. Thanks to Adyen's solution, we reduced the number of clicks and swipes in the payment flow, and entry errors have been reduced." - Martin Balas, Birchbox
Get started in minutes
Adyen Checkout is the fast, secure, developer-friendly way to accept payments anywhere, on any device. You can create a mobile-optimised, secure checkout in minutes, with just a few lines of code.
For customised mobile checkouts, our SDK comes with a suite of tools to fine-tune the experience. Everything is hosted on our site, so you benefit from on-page analytics to start A/B testing and find the best payment flows.
Quick integration
Custom integration
Everything in one place
Integrating with Adyen Checkout gives you access to the full power of our platform. Unlike other payments providers, we take care of the payment processing, risk management and acquiring.
This makes things easier since you don't have to worry about separate providers or mobile payment software. And, with everything managed in one place, you can see exactly what’s going on.
We handle the entire payment flow on one platform.
Businesses using mobile payment methods with us
We provide mobile payment options for some of the world's fastest-growing businesses.
Uber is the ultimate invisible payment, requiring no action from the customer at all.
Beauty subscription business Birchbox has a great example of a mobile-optimised browser checkout.
easyJet uses Apple Pay to make paying as easy as a couple of taps.
Film company Pathé has integrated iDEAL into its mobile checkout.
Start your journey with Adyen today
Getting started is easy. Create an account, and explore all the tools you need to grow your business.