Payments training for fast growing businesses
Your guide to payments: How they work and how they’ll help you grow your business.
Payments: Your competitive edge
There’s a lot to think about when you’re growing your business. There's distribution and logistics, marketing communications, and customer service.
As you expand to new markets, the complexity only increases with language barriers, cultural nuances, local regulations, and local partners to deal with. It can be easy to overlook payments and leave them to the last minute. But if you do this, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
Payments will increase your revenue and drive your growth
A report by Forrester found that businesses working with Adyen typically increased revenue by 1%. So, if your annual revenue is $50 million, you’re looking at an additional annual revenue of $500,000.
Not bad for a few hours development work. But how? Payments have the potential to unlock more revenue and give you an edge over the competition by:
- making buying easy with an optimized checkout;
- increasing conversion rates with local payment methods;
- recognizing loyal shoppers and blocking fraudsters;
- getting the best deals on international card fees;
- ensuring valid payments are authorized quickly; and
- giving rich data insights into customer behavior.
This guide will walk you step-by-step through a payment flow and explain how each stage can help you close more sales while saving you money.
How payments work
Before we dive in, it’s important to understand what actually happens from the moment your customer hits ‘pay’. Here’s a breakdown of the payment process.
Shopper
The shopper hits ‘buy’ or enters their card into a pin terminal.
Payment gateway (or checkout)
The gateway is the interface between the payment processor and your shopper. To keep things simple, we’ll call it your checkout.
Risk assessment
If the payment is online, the risk assessor checks the transaction to make sure it’s not fraudulent.
Acquiring
If it’s a card payment, the acquirer connects to the shopper’s issuing bank and requests authorization.
Processing
The payment processor receives a response from the acquirer and either processes the payment or lets you know it was declined.
Settlement
If the payment is authorized, the money will be settled into your bank.
Each step along the way provides opportunities for optimization. The following chapters will explain how.
How payments work
Chapter 1 | Optimize your checkout
Chapter 2 | Streamline point of sale payments
Chapter 3 | Expand with local payment methods
Chapter 4 | Fine-tune your risk management
Chapter 5 | Get the best from your card processing