What e-commerce startups can learn from customers’ payment experiences

If you run an e-commerce startup, the one thing that might very often bother you is your payments system – a lot of your payments probably happen online, so having a robust online payment system is a significant part of your growth strategy.

At YourStory’s TechSparks 2015, we had Rahul Kothari, Business Head of PayUbiz, who helped us decode the innovation in this space through some frequently occurring examples of customer experiences. 

According to Rahul, the innovations happening in this space can actually push success rates up or reduce the drop-in-transaction rates by around 5-7 per cent. And when he says 5-7 per cent, it’s very meaningful for the business, because that translates into a 5-7 per cent increase in revenue. 

It is no secret that the market for mobile payments or mobile commerce has grown close to $3.5 billion. According to the team at PayUbiz, India is the fourth largest startup breeding ground globally for mobile commerce with 100 million users, a number that is expected to reach a figure of 350 million by 2020. Rahul also pointed out that the growth curve for mobile commerce would be 4-5 times faster than that of e-commerce. 

Watch Rahul Kothari's talk at TechSparks 2015

A typical customer journey during payments

Rahul explained that a typical journey customer goes for mobile payments: puts in his or her card details, including the CVV number and then has to go to the next page. The problem very often is that you need to have your card with you throughout the process. And if you’ve ever carried out a transaction like that, you must have prayed that the session didn’t expire before you typed in all the information.

Problem #2 starts with the user interface where, typically, payment pages are not optimised for phone screens, making it difficult to select an option and forcing you to zoom in to find and then select an option. You’re then required to come out of the screens, go to their messages get the OTP and feed it back in the page. The experience becomes quite complicated.

Innovation to make the experience simpler

PayUbiz has been working on improving the customer experience for customers and is the leading innovator in this space.

In addition to introducing scorecard feature, PayUbiz is working on making the entire interface more thumb-friendly. Rahul believes that 90 percent of people choose OTP through SMS and the latest innovation gets the app to automatically read the OTP from the SMS, leaving you with only the last step, which is to approve the payment.

Check out how PayUBiz makes payments a whole lot smoother

Net speeds and lack thereof

Often enough, payments don’t go through and fail because of latency issues in the network. To address this frequently occurring problem, PayUbiz has introduced auto retry options, where, if the transaction fails at a certain point, the customer just has to click on ‘retry’ rather than having to go back to square one and starting all over again.

The company also has APIs that will tell the customer at the start of the journey that a certain bank server is down, and gives them the option of selecting other payment options. All of which make the customer experience smoother and stress-free. 

If you’re an entrepreneur, reducing the transaction drop rate is certainly something you want, and yet you’re probably wondering how much technology bandwidth and developers you’ll need for this. The answer is that there are already companies working on this; their software kits are readily available. They’ve done the hard work – all you need to do is integrate it into your platform.

In conclusion, Rahul said that the industry as a whole was working to improve backend technologies while integrating these with front-end apps to reduce transaction-drop rates. And, this is impacting the businesses significantly to improve their customer experience and revenue.