A fresh look at the payments landscape

Customers are using new technologies to alter the ways they interact with their physical and digital worlds – and they assume businesses will keep pace.

Appeal to mobile customers

Mobile phones are staples of our daily lives. And the time we spend using mobile devices to purchase goods and services grows each year. In fact, mobile sales are expected to reach $3.4 trillion and 62% in 2027.¹ With so many customers shopping on smaller mobile screens, businesses need to optimize for a friction-free mobile experience. Big gains in conversions and repeat customers could result from:

• Simpler navigation
• Fewer form fields
• Faster load times

Drive conversions with a streamlined customer experience

Despite growing e-commerce sales, businesses still face high levels of cart abandonment. One key to driving conversion is removing barriers and creating friction-free checkout process.

• Alleviate security concerns: Security concerns are the main barrier to online purchasing across markets.² To promote confidence, only offer payment methods customers trust, and prominently display SSL certificates and industry-leading trust logos.
• Maintain cost transparency: Customers don’t like surprises. Throughout the shopping journey, be very clear about taxes, shipping costs, and any other fees that a customer could incur to avoid frustration and abandonment.
• Keep it simple: Make it easy for customers to check out quickly. Let them check out directly from product pages, and give them ways to skip entering payment and shipping information.
• Allow guest checkout: Roughly one-third of customers surveyed say they’re less likely to make an online purchase if they’re required to create a new user account first.² Default to a guest checkout flow so customers can check out quickly.
• Offer preferred payment methods: Customers expect their preferred payment methods to be available, and 68% of customers said they will not shop at a retailer that does not offer their preferred payment types.³ This could often mean a local payment method, a digital wallet like PayPal, or even a buy now, pay later option for larger purchases.
• Use smart authorization rate tools: To properly authenticate purchases and avoid false declines that can frustrate customers, rely on network tokens, 3D Secure, account updater tools, and smart retry strategies.

Remove checkout barriers and drive conversion with PayPal

Both businesses and customers trust PayPal:

• Of enterprise PayPal merchants surveyed, 85% agree that PayPal is the most trusted payment method their company accepts⁴
• PayPal is the second most trusted brand across the financial services industry in the United States⁵
• Of PayPal users surveyed, 55% have abandoned a purchase because PayPal was not an option at checkout⁶

Mitigate risk with machine learning

As businesses work to make checkout easier for customers, they may also be easing the way for bad actors to commit fraud. Fraud and chargebacks cost businesses time and money and are potentially damaging to your brand. And as your business grows, you may also see your chargeback volume grow. This is why fraud management tools are essential to flagging as many fraudulent transactions as possible – without affecting the checkout experiences of good customers.

Try leveraging machine learning – powered by the right high-quality data – to help intelligently manage fraud and minimize chargebacks. And consider a dispute automation system, which can help you centralize dispute management, decrease operational costs, optimize win rates, and ultimately enable you to scale with a growing transaction volume.

Mitigate risk with PayPal’s fraud management solutions

PayPal has the insights, experience, and technology to help you confidently handle what’s next.

• Global insights: PayPal has processed $1.36 trillion in total payment volume of transactions throughout 20+ years.⁷
• Experience: PayPal sees 62 million fraud events per year.⁸
• Intelligent technology: PayPal has 10+ billion identifiers in our network.⁹

Grow revenue with the future of payments

When your business aspires to grow in an evolving payments landscape, you need to be ready for what’s next. This could mean expanding to new regions, or increasing digital or in-person channel capabilities to offer a unified shopping experience so that customers can move seamlessly between online and in-store shopping. Whether you do one or both, you should orchestrate growth efficiently in ways that don’t intrude on a smooth customer interaction, and ensure shoppers always have the same great experience with your brand.

To succeed in a new market, aim to offer locally preferred payment methods and relevant third-party services. But instead of connecting with many local payment processors in each new region, maximize one connection with a payments orchestrator or PSP to orchestrate growth efficiently. The same goes for payouts. Work with a PSP that maintains established relationships in different regions to pay sellers quickly through local banks and avoid cross-border fees. The right payment service provider (PSP) can help make sure you’re covered for today and ready for tomorrow.

Learn how other businesses are growing with PayPal

• Adobe uses PayPal Braintree as a payments orchestrator to integrate popular payment options under one platform.
• When Southwest Airlines experienced massive holiday travel disruptions and wanted to quickly compensate customers, it implemented PayPal Hyperwallet to distribute $250 million to 200,000 customers within six weeks.¹⁰
• Adorama collaborated with PayPal to offer seamless experiences to customers in both the digital and physical realms.

Prioritize payments

After taking a fresh look at the payments landscape, are you ready to elevate your business with an integrated, data-driven payments solution?

Download our ebook to learn how PayPal can help your business adapt to evolving customer preferences and take advantage of growth opportunities.