Adyen for Platforms — Part 3 of 4

Delivering great payments experiences everywhere

In this guide, you’ll learn:

Tips to accelerate platform growth with payments

How to attract customers with a unified experience

Ways to convert them with the right payment methods

Best practices for managing payment transaction risk

Give everyone the payments experiences they want

It’s never been easier for consumers to make a purchase. Online, in-store, via chatbot, as the list of where people like to buy grows, so, too, does the number of ways they like to pay. But the resulting combinations of payment methods and channels make it hard for platforms to keep up.

No wonder leading brands like Amazon and Uber work tirelessly to meet their customers’ growing payments expectations – hiring payments experts, digging into data-rich insights, and investing in technology to differentiate themselves from the competition.

But not all companies can afford these resources. Small and medium-sized businesses, solopreneurs, and individual sellers find themselves also tasked with competing mainly on customer experience, but often have the hardest time creating customer-first payments flows on their own.

Platforms like yours are the answer. By integrating payments into your business model, you can help solve this serious challenge and sustain growth for everyone. It all starts by offering the best payments experience, so you can attract and convert even more customers on behalf of your users.

In part three, we join the dots on key payment capabilities and trends your platform can use to deliver a great payments experience for users – and the end customer.

How payments accelerate platform growth

While every platform’s payments journey is unique, there’s one thing that remains the same: Payments are always a strategic driver for value and growth. Why? Because joining your business goals to your payments lets you achieve them faster and with greater control.

Take scaling to new regions, countries, or markets. A payments-first approach lets you pave the way by addressing regulations and payment hurdles at the start. Although global expansion requires a thorough knowledge of local payment methods and channels, you don’t have to have all the answers. Instead, by leaning on a knowledgeable payments partner, you can benefit from their expertise across geographies, payment methods, and changing customer preferences.

Like commerce platform Lightspeed, which provides cloud-based, all-in-one commerce solutions for retailers and restaurateurs in 100+ countries. Says Jona Georgiou, General Manager of Payments: “Supporting Hospitality customers globally is something that we take very seriously as a commerce platform. We’ve learned that providing a one-stop solution makes our core SaaS products stickier, and enables merchants to simplify their operations, scale for growth, and provide exceptional customer experiences. Adyen supports our vision of supporting this space globally, with localization and payment regulatory framework thought through in each region.”

Here’s how to deliver the best payments experience for customers at each point in the buyer’s journey: Attracting, converting, and protecting.

Attracting customers

At its heart, attracting customers is all about selling wherever people are buying across different sales channels. For platforms, managing this can get complicated, fast, especially as your business grows. The solution? Connecting everything in one place with unified commerce.

Giving customers total flexibility with unified commerce

It’s no secret that today’s consumers want seamless, cross-channel experiences. Adyen research shows that 73% of customers now expect brands to sell on multiple channels, while 1 in 4 say they’ll abandon a purchase if there’s no cross-channel buying option.

If your platform is already delivering omnichannel services to meet these demands, you’re on the right track. But unless your backend systems are also connected, you’re missing out on valuable cross-channel insights that could help you stay one step ahead when things change.

Omnichannel

Unified Commerce

In fact, unified commerce is the only approach that provides a single view of inventory, customers, and payments. By connecting all your platform’s online and offline channel data in one system, you can become more agile and adaptable (especially in the face of major disruptions like a global pandemic).

How unified commerce simplifies selling

PAIN POINT

Lack of cross-channel insights

Customers interact across a multitude of brand touch points, but since your sales channels aren't connected, you can't track them.

SOLUTION

Unified commerce

Recognize customers across sales channels to build better buyer experiences and increase spend.
Enable payment-linked loyalty.
Ensure a consistent experience across channels.

PAIN POINT

Growing demand for flexible sales channels

Inability to add new channels and be proactive on consumer trends (e.g. self-scan and pay).

SOLUTION

Unified commerce

Support growth into new markets and/or segments.
Quickly add new channels and support new customer journeys.
Differentiate your business from competitor platforms with loyalty-driving payments experiences.

PAIN POINT

Compounding operational complexity

Platform operations are scattered across multiple systems, making reconciliation and reporting more resource-intensive for finance teams, and systems maintenance more complex for engineering teams.

SOLUTION

Unified commerce

View all payments data in one reporting system for easy reconciliation and analysis.
Use payment data more easily to inform business strategy/growth plans.
Reduce the amount of manual or error-prone work for reporting or finance teams.

Modernizing Medicine and Zenoti use Adyen for Platforms to deliver unified commerce with our full range of POS terminals and ecommerce channels.

Read their journey

Converting customers

Turning browsers into buyers at checkout gets a lot easier when you can offer the payment methods they prefer. You don’t have to guess till you get it right, take what you already know about your customers to build a hyper-local payments experience wherever they shop.

3 steps to choosing the right payment method mix

Selecting the best payment methods for your platform requires consideration of three things: geography, demographics, and platform type. We recommend working with a payment service provider (PSP) to fine-tune as you go, since they’ll have experience you can rely on across key markets.

Look at geographics

Just like regional differences in architecture, language, and cuisine, payment methods vary in popularity from country to country. Navigating all these ways to pay can be dizzying, but it’s the most important consideration you can make when choosing your payment methods mix.

North America

A relatively straightforward payments landscape. Credit cards dominate, but debit cards, digital wallets, and buy now, pay later (BNPL) services are also popular (with BNPL growing 200% last year in the US alone).

Asia Pacific

A fragmented payments landscape, with each country favoring different payment methods. For example, China’s top three are Alipay, UnionPay, and WeChat Pay, while in Japan, cash on delivery, Konbini, and local credit card JCB are preferred.

“You absolutely have to offer the local payment methods. Otherwise, you are perceived as not understanding a local market. We currently have the ability, with our integration with Adyen and our partners, to absolutely do that. We can turn a local payment method on [with a click]. To do that ourselves, it would be a tremendous effort.”

Kevin Goddard ･Head of Payments, Cloudbeds

Weigh demographics

Next up is demographics. Knowing the details about your customers when it comes to things like age, income, and employment status can help you better serve them and pave the way for a successful experience at checkout.

For example, the payment preference differences between Gen Zs and Baby Boomers:

Gen Z

Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z may be the youngest cohort, but they’re already making up 20% of the world’s population. It's important to let these digital natives pay with technology-first payment methods, like tokenized card details saved conveniently to their mobile wallet (e.g. Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Amazon Pay).

Baby Boomers

Born between 1946 and 1964, Baby Boomers have the second highest buying power after millennials. Although technology-averse, they have been forced to adapt to new experiences like buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) and contactless. But at the end of the day, they prefer using credit cards, cash, and debit cards.

Quickly add new payment methods (often without additional contracts) to build your optimal payment method mix with Adyen for Platforms.

Consider your platform type

Last, but not least, it’s important to think about your platform’s business model. What payment methods does the competition offer? What payment methods are expected by customers at checkout as a result? Your answers can help pinpoint anything you might have overlooked.
To guide your analysis, here’s an overview of common payment methods by platform type.

Marketplace

Goal

Bring together buyers and sellers of a certain good or service and facilitate a sale.

Needs

Often global reach, so customers want to pay in their country’s currency and local payment method.

Suggested methods

Cards, digital wallets, BNPL, and online banking.

On-demand

Goal

Allow customers to order a service and gig works to deliver as quickly as possible.

Needs

Often mobile transactions, so want to be able to limit the number of clicks to speed up checkout.

Suggested methods

Cards, digital wallets.

SaaS

Goal

Provide applications to enable businesses to operate online and in-store.

Needs

Often subscription-based, so must be stored for recurring payments; typically offers fullstack payment solutions.

Suggested methods

Cards, digital wallets, direct debit.

Protecting customers

While the positives far outweigh the negatives, accepting payments does ultimately open your platform to risk. To protect your business and customers, you need to build a risk management system that combines different techniques and technology to make the best risk decisions.

“We are entering a new era in machine learning, where the customer problems are more complex. And they’re more complex for two main reasons: There are various complex customer journeys, and they are happening anywhere, anytime.”

Jose Rodriguez ･Adyen Product Lead, Risk

Best practices for managing payment transaction risk

At the end of the day, all businesses that process transactions (especially those that process the majority online) must balance security with the customer experience. And although many choose to prioritize security over customer experience, this hasn’t really helped reduce fraud.

Despite blocking transactions at the slightest hint of inconsistency, online payment fraud grew to exceed $20 billion in 2021.

Source

Unfortunately, since fraud is so dynamic, there isn’t a silver bullet for managing it. But you can protect customers by creating a risk management system that learns as the risk landscape changes around it. The following best practices can help as you build one for your business.

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Get good at distinguishing the genuine from the fraudulent

Detecting fraud is often incredibly challenging for platforms because fraudsters are evolving their activities all the time. But that doesn’t mean your platform is at their mercy.

Fighting fraud requires a risk management system that:

Uses advanced data science and machine learning models that detect behavioral abnormalities and learn as they go.
Spots fraudsters across sales channels.
Recognizes genuine customers.

If that sounds like something that requires a lot of time and resources your team doesn’t have, don’t worry. Your PSP should actually be the one to deliver these capabilities, helping you detect fraud and avoid unintentional biases regarding location, payment method, or transaction value.

Block fraud, prevent disputes, and stay ahead of the latest trends using advanced technology featuring customizable risk rules with Adyen.

Explore RevenueProtect

Making payments core to your platform business

A guide to owning the experience from end to end

Part 1

Managing money flows with control and compliance ›

Part 2

Onboarding new users with seamless sign-ups ›

Part 3