Customer engagement, seamless checkout experience, and more: Decoding the D2C payments playbook

When it comes to improving the payment experience for D2C brands, ease and choice of payments are critical factors for success and differentiation. Positive payment experiences can impact every aspect of the D2C brand experience from winning customers, driving loyalty and even lowering operational costs for D2C players.

To help decode the D2C payments playbook, and how to improve the payment experience, thought leaders from the D2C space including Manish Chowdhary, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Body Cupid; Gaurav Khatri, Co-founder, Noise; Nitin Agarwal, Co-Founder and Chief Growth officer, UpScalio; Swagat Sarangi, Co-Founder, Smytten; and Khilan Haria, Head of Payments Products, Razorpay, came together to discuss modern payments experience for D2C players, payment playbooks, with inputs from Razorpay on the latest innovations in payments.

The two-day virtual event on January 28-29, 2022 brought together leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, policy makers, and enablers who are leading the transformation in the D2C landscape of the country.

Here are the key takeaways from the discussion.

Improving the customer payment journey

The discussion kicked off with Khilan talking about the most important considerations D2C brands need to make to improve their customer payment journey - which he drew from Razorpay’s experience of working towards building the financial backbone of Indian businesses.

“New users are a little more anxious and get a lot more worried about failures. If they see failures, their immediate reaction is to go back to cash. I believe therefore, the experience really has to be thought through separately for the new and mature users,” he said.

“Saving cards, optimising experiences to be as frictionless as possible, minimising reductions, or ensuring that things work in low internet conditions are a given today. The tricky aspect is solving for less tech savvy customers or those coming online for the first time, and tailoring an experience for them,” he added.

Enabling product-consumer interaction

Swagat opines that sampling-led tried-and-tested methods of customer engagement will change the way D2C brands and consumers interact. He spoke about the solutions and innovations that enable this product-consumer interaction; and the role of simplified payment experiences.

“India, in general, has a very low trust culture, right? So there's always a little bit of hesitation when you're trying something for the first time,” he said.

We are solving this by giving a consumer lower entry points and a low risk environment to build a better culture of trust,” he added.

Payment experiences in the product-customer journey

Drawing from his experience at Noise, a consumer electronics brand that sells smart wearables, Bluetooth earphones, portable speakers, and more, Gaurav spoke about the key trends he observed and how the payment experience played a role in Noise’s product-customer journey.

“Payment experiences in the product-customer journey have completely transformed the D2C space. In the nascent years of DTC, the biggest problem was not bringing the consumer on your platform, it was making the consumer transact on your platform,” he said.

“Beside the variety of payment options, the sheer ease of payments has been a huge catalyst for growth. Today transactions that take place with a single swipe or click used to take up to four steps to complete in the last two or three years,” he added.

“I believe the most important factor is the speed at which we do a checkout today. What we have learned from our journey is that 70 percent of consumers drop out if there are issues with the payment experience. And the faster and easier you make the payment process, the lesser your drop-out rate would be,” said Manish, building on Gaurav’s views.

“Improving checkout flows is one of the core levers for us in terms of D2C growth,” said UpScalio’s Nitin, talking about the best practices for working with a slicker and seamless checkout experience.

“Have a solution for times when payments systems are down, optimise your checkout flow, give customers the assurance of a safe buy, and ensure your checkout flow load times are as fast or if not faster than your website load time,” he added, talking about his playbook for optimised payment experiences.

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