Mobile Payment Integration: 6 Keys To Success

Why a great mobile expe­ri­ence is crit­i­cal for your con­sumers and your brand.

Lisa Williams By Lisa Williams from Sustainable Digital Marketing. Join the discussion » 0 comments

The need for mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion from a cus­tomer-cen­tric per­spec­tive is far over­due. For near­ly 20 years we’ve been wait­ing for the adop­tion of any kind of dig­i­tal wal­let. 2015 turned out to final­ly be the year of mobile (mobile search final­ly eclipsed desk­top search) and we’re start­ing to see the emer­gence of tech­nol­o­gy and finan­cial ser­vices mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion options that may actu­al­ly deserve adop­tion for both desk­top and mobile.


Brands will encounter sev­er­al hur­dles on their quest to improve mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion. Here are six keys to suc­cess­ful mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion.

1. Meet Consumer Demand

Con­sumers are demand­ing eas­i­er check­out options as they become accus­tomed to fric­tion­less and one-touch check­out such as the expe­ri­ence they have with Uber and Airbnb, which allows the app to store your pay­ment pref­er­ences for ongo­ing use.

Com­pa­nies such as Brain­tree (a Pay­Pal com­pa­ny) have emerged to accept every­thing from Pay­Pal to Bit­coin to Apple pay to Google Wal­let and any oth­ers with a sin­gle inte­gra­tion touch­point. Brain­tree pro­vides a mer­chant account, pay­ment gate­way, and recur­ring billing and cred­it card stor­age. Their One Touch seam­less check­out and one click instal­la­tion are solv­ing mobile check­out for both brands and con­sumers as they increase col­lab­o­ra­tion efforts with com­pa­nies like Magen­to, Big­Com­merce, and oth­er mer­chants to enable one touch check­out.

Mobile is the dri­ving force behind Face­book growth, 59 per­cent of its $2.3 bil­lion of ad rev­enues in the first quar­ter of this year came from mobile. As brands and social plat­forms cre­ate strat­e­gy around a mobile-first expe­ri­ence con­sumers will con­tin­ue to up the ante on expec­ta­tion of the mobile check­out process.

2. Mobile Wallet Adoption

Ecom­merce, shop­ping carts, and billing appli­ca­tions have to become more seam­less for the mobile user. How­ev­er, the need for faster, eas­i­er mobile pay­ment pro­cess­ing faces a myr­i­ad of hur­dles. Adop­tion is still slow because not every­one trusts the secu­ri­ty of mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion.

The issues inher­ent in mobile pay­ment pro­cess­ing, whether it’s in-per­son pay­ments, remote pay­ments or peer-to-peer pay­ments, are being resolved by mer­chants, banks and 3rd par­ty solu­tions and a clear win­ner has yet to emerge. Google Wal­let, Apple Pay, and Pay­Pal are attempt­ing to over­come the adop­tion issue.

Google Wal­let is now FDIC insured and oth­ers will like­ly fol­low suit. They know they will need to pro­vide improved secu­ri­ty along with sophis­ti­cat­ed finan­cial ser­vices and tech­nol­o­gy inte­gra­tion.

Align­ing mer­chants, users, and banks is enor­mous­ly com­plex and some banks will be intro­duc­ing their own wal­lets, as will some mer­chants. But brands can’t wait for time to declare a win­ner in this race.

Adop­tion of more secure mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion is going to become the norm. As report­ed on PYMNTS.com:

New require­ments for mer­chants will go into effect by July 2015. And for some mer­chants, it has the poten­tial to change the user expe­ri­ence that they have worked so hard to per­fect, despite the good­ness that it will deliv­er in the form of increased com­pli­ance with card­hold­er data pro­tec­tion require­ments.”

Brand suc­cess in adopt­ing a mobile wal­let will depend on strik­ing a bal­ance between two impor­tant pri­or­i­ties; secu­ri­ty of the check­out and ease of check­out.

3. Invest In Mobile Payment Integration

The cost of improv­ing mobile task com­ple­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in regards to mobile pay­ments, is going to require a large invest­ment. Brands will need to ded­i­cate bud­get, resources, and ongo­ing project spon­sor­ship for the con­tin­ued revi­sions and improve­ments that will be nec­es­sary for iter­a­tive improve­ment to the mobile pay­ment expe­ri­ence.

Brands may need to focus less on ROI from improved mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion and more on user secu­ri­ty and expe­ri­ence for this invest­ment in infra­struc­ture and process.

4. Improve The Mobile Checkout Process

HotJar

Hav­ing a fast and easy mobile pay­ment solu­tion is just one part of the equa­tion. Com­bin­ing the need for improved usabil­i­ty, increased speed, and improved pay­ment inte­gra­tion options for mobile users are table stakes for achiev­ing mobile suc­cess.

Lever­ag­ing form test­ing plat­forms such as Form­stack and Hot­jar pro­vide the abil­i­ty to test mobile inte­gra­tion and oth­er forms to be able to achieve a more stream­lined expe­ri­ence for mobile users.

The mobile pay­ment process is heav­i­ly depen­dent on the user inter­face. Lever­ag­ing user test­ing com­pa­nies such as User­Zoom can iter­a­tive­ly improve the process.

5. Prioritize Mobile First

PayPal’s Don Schul­man rec­om­mends we can’t just be test­ing for improved secu­ri­ty, but that we need to be “con­sumer cham­pi­ons” and help pro­vide a mobile-first expe­ri­ence that takes into con­sid­er­a­tion the needs of con­sumers across the spec­trum of pay­ment options and inte­gra­tion.

Part­ner­ships to deal with these issues to date have been slow to emerge. PayPal’s Brain­tree is grow­ing quick­ly as is Stripe, which allows both pri­vate indi­vid­u­als and busi­ness­es to accept pay­ments. Plat­form builders like Kent Schnepp, founder of Odysys, are choos­ing Stripe because of use of use as well as their com­pet­i­tive rates and that they have a robust doc­u­ment­ed API.

Brands that ded­i­cate resources to mobile-first gain an advan­tage on inte­gra­tion and mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that aren’t as rel­e­vant for desk­top. For exam­ple, there is enor­mous oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to align a consumer’s local actions with mobile wal­let options.

Pro­vid­ing a coupon at check­out for a cus­tomer who is at a local store is a pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty, as demon­strat­ed by this Men’s Ware­house case study.

It becomes less about pay­ment pro­cess­ing and more about improv­ing and per­son­al­iz­ing the shop­ping expe­ri­ence with local and mobile inte­gra­tion.

6. Measure Mobile Payment Success

Improve­ments in mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion can dra­mat­i­cal­ly impact con­ver­sion. That’s a great place to begin mea­sure­ment to quan­ti­fy suc­cess and invest­ment, but your mea­sure­ment should go fur­ther.

Brands should use quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive data as they cre­ate an iter­a­tive plan for mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion improve­ment. Brand per­cep­tion and image are inex­tri­ca­bly tied to our brand expe­ri­ence includ­ing the mobile check­out process.

Under­stand­ing the qual­i­ta­tive result of mobile pay­ment invest­ment may be as impor­tant as the met­rics around rev­enue increas­es from improved mobile check­out.

Takeaways

As mobile cus­tomers begin to have bet­ter mobile pay­ment expe­ri­ences, they will come to expect all mobile check­outs to be as good as their best expe­ri­ences, so com­par­ing your mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion with com­peti­tors may be irrel­e­vant.

It’s not good enough to wait on the side­lines for finan­cial insti­tu­tions and mobile expe­ri­ence to work out all of the kinks in the mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion land­scape. Brands must be first-adopters. It’s a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for your brand to work through its issues and show your cus­tomers you care about their mobile pay­ment expe­ri­ence.

Final­ly, mobile users cre­ate a strong rela­tion­ship between their mobile expe­ri­ence and the brand. If you’re strug­gling to find bud­get to improve mobile pay­ments, it may be time to invest brand bud­get into those iter­a­tive improve­ments.


How are you address­ing mobile pay­ment inte­gra­tion to improve brand expe­ri­ence?

Lisa Williams

Written by Lisa Williams

President, Sustainable Digital Marketing

Lisa Williams is the President of Sustainable Digital Marketing. She is a 19-year veteran of online marketing and has been featured in Kiplinger Magazine, Glamour Magazine, Boston Globe and The Oregonian. She recently authored her first book, "When Everybody Clicks: Sustainable Digital Marketing". Lisa is on the SEMpdx (Search Engine Marketing Professionals of Portland Oregon) Advisory Board. She speaks at regional, national and international conferences on the topics of digital strategy, marketing integration, team development and leadership. She is available for training and consulting.

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