Upgrading eCommerce Websites to Use a Payment Gateway API
Nexus Software Systems helps businesses to dramatically improve their payment processing capabilities, by upgrading their eCommerce website’s shopping cart to use an eCommerce payment gateway provider’s Application Programming Interface (API) features effectively.
The eCommerce Website Challenge:
Many clients have contacted us about upgrading their eCommerce website’s shopping cart software in order to benefit from the enhanced payment functionality of an eCommerce payment gateway provider’s API.
A simple, easy-to-use checkout process is one of the most important eCommerce features.
Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest challenges online merchants face. Having a customizable, branded, Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant payment system in place which enables customers to experience a smooth, secure, unencumbered checkout process is critical to your success online …
Online merchants, cited by Econsultancy as having exemplary checkouts, reports that improvements in the checkout experience ultimately contributed to a 54% decrease in cart abandonment.
Although legacy software may have worked well enough in the past, technology has changed and so have customer’s expectations. Customer’s now expect a smooth and efficient checkout process. An efficient checkout is even more important for mobile eCommerce, which today represents more than half of an eCommerce website’s visitors.
Most payment gateways have features that are designed to help you create a better, more secure shopping experience for your customers. These payment gateway features include:
- Multiple payment types
- Fraud Protection
- Tokenization
- Saved customer information
- Recurring Payments
- Software Integration
- Hosted Payment Forms
To use these features requires understanding the payment gateway’s API (which should be well documented), and developing software to access the API and the features it provides. Software that works with your particular eCommerce system or shopping cart and business work flow.
Because the payment processing function of older shopping cart software may be based on older API methods that have been replaced or deprecated, in order to access the benefits of the new API features and enhanced functionality, the old shopping cart software needs to be modified.
The eCommerce Website Solution:
First we examine what a client has to work with, in terms of functionality and how it was implemented. Often the basic upgrade of a shopping cart application to be able to access and get the benefits of using a payment gateway’s API is relatively easy. It’s just a matter of creating functions to encapsulate existing form values in a JSON or XML payload and posting to the appropriate API URL with the correct parameters, then parsing and acting on the response from the API. In these cases the complete upgrade can take less than a day or two, including testing.
The Results:
After upgrading their application to be able access a payment gateway provider’s API, our clients are now able to easily connect to the payment gateway and use the enhanced features provided, which ensures fast, reliable, and secure transmission of their transaction data, while providing a greatly enhanced customer experience, enabling them to keep their customers on their website, with a customized, seamless checkout process, as well as benefit from the additional enhanced functionality of the payment gateway’s API, resulting on average in a 225% increase in conversions and 54% decrease in abandoned shopping carts.
By using a payment gateway’s API effectively, you avoid losing customers at the final stage of their purchase by creating a less demanding checkout.
In addition to providing a great eCommerce shopping experience for your customers by enabling a frictionless checkout, a payment gateway’s API may enable you to create and store customer payment and address data for subsequent use.
Recognizing return customers provides a seamless and effortless checkout experience.
When a return customer reaches the checkout and requests to pay, tokenization technology uses the token associated with the customer to recall the stored payment data from the payment gateway’s secure servers. This minimizes your risk and effort in securing the payment and ensures the functionality of the checkout process without taking your customers out of their comfort zones – or your brand experience.
By Analyzing your stored customers' profiles you are better able to match their preferences in the future.
You can analyze payment data in order to gain insight into inefficiencies in your payment processing flow, as well as to gain an improved understanding of customer behaviour on your eCommerce website. This data can indicate checkout deterrents, which can be used to cater to customer preferences in the future.
Another feature of some payment gateway’s API is fraud management. You can use the fraud management feature of the payment gateway’s API to access suspicious transactions and then approve or decline them.
By identifying and understanding why transactions are being declined, you can pro-actively make changes to ensure better payment processing performance.
Conclusion
Improvements to the checkout process provide unparalleled opportunities for driving eCommerce website conversions.
By choosing the right payment gateway and using the included payment processing features effectively, your eCommerce website can get amazing results, in terms of increased conversions, happy customers, and reduced shopping cart abandonment.
Contact us for a free evaluation of your eCommerce website or shopping cart and its ability to access and effectively use enhanced payment gateway features.