From Checkout to Growth: How Payments can fuel eCommerce

In an era where e-commerce is transcending traditional boundaries, Payments is at the forefront, driving transformation with unparalleled efficiency and innovation. As we look towards a future where over 40% of sales across industries will transition to online within five years, and with online payments growing at double digits (e.g., Online payments in Spain projected to grow by 20%) the need for a robust, seamless e-commerce payment solution has never been more critical.

On this regard leading PSPs are pivoting on 4 pillars to fuel ecommerce payment needs:

1.??????? Frictionless Go-To-Market experiences

Instant availability and set up of solutions are key to enable ecommerce businesses to start offering their service, therefore minimum friction at GTM. Products that are API driven and are conceive under the foundation of low/no code are easy to plug in and to use by merchants creating user friendly experience with very minimum frictions.

2.??????? Payment and user experience is key

Consistency brings simplicity and optimize payment experiences both for the customer and the PSP (e.g., having the same tools and interface in all regions simplifies processes and adaption from customers).?

Increase conversions should be a core design principle of any Payment checkout process. The end goal is to create a seamless process that reduces checkout time (e.g., stored payment credentials), limits errors (A/B testing) through optimization tools (e.g., dynamic payment method based on buyer details) -? in EU the average checkout process is around 3min, beyond this threshold >60% of customers drop the process.

Performance increase using data driven products that provide an augmented service delivery for fraud, transaction authorization among other functionalities embedded into the checkout process. Additionally, with the latest eruption of GenAI merchants and PSPs could benefit from the various applications and benefits from this new technology (e.g., customer service efficiencies ranges 20-40% - incident handling)

3.??????? Services consolidation under one single platform

A leading platform should host Payment acceptance (e.g., rich catalog of payment solutions available per geography), integrate other financial products (e.g., embedded finance) all wrapped around automation of financial process (e.g., ML/AI driven processes). The objective of the platform is to empower business to consume and adopt as many services as they might need with the minimum resistance.?

4.??????? Platform availability as undisputable requirement

Trust means everything, and trust is only guarantee through platform availability. Businesses cannot afford down times when it comes to payment acceptance, which is why platform availability is at the very top of their purchasing criteria when selecting providers. PSPs have understood the importance of providing and developing a strong platform, capable of delivering the constant availability – Stripe has achieved 99.999% availability throughout the >$1T payments processed annually.

Customer preferences and needs are evolving rapidly, expecting ubiquitous experiences across platforms with limited friction (e.g., one click payment methods like Stripe Link). In the same way, the prefer payment methods are evolving as well based on customers preferences for channels and moments (e.g., today cards represent 40% of total global checkout as per Stripe data). Merchants have realized the importance on relying on a PSP that is capable of addressing the payment preferences and needs from customers, all under a simple and intuitive experience with the certainty of superb performance and execution. ?