How to Boost Your Online Payment Acceptance Rate

Learn what causes payment declines via an online payment gateway and what you can do to increase your payment acceptance rate proactively.

Without a doubt, the Internet and handheld digital devices have irreversibly altered consumer behavior and raised expectations.

As a result, when it comes to user experience, today's consumers will accept nothing less than perfection and uninterrupted functionality. Particularly in the department of payment processing.

What they want is a personalized, multichannel approach that works equally well on desktop, mobile, and tablets.

As a result, merchants began putting more emphasis on perfecting transactional processes in order to keep up with market trends, as successful payments (or lack thereof) have a direct impact on revenue.

This essentially means that merchants began paying closer attention to increasing profits by focusing on improving customer experience during payment processes.

Optimized Payment Page Design, Higher Conversion Rate

When it comes to optimizing your payment acceptance rate, aesthetically pleasing and easily understandable design is essential.

If your checkout is cluttered and counterintuitive, your customers may abandon their carts in frustration.

Fortunately, there are guidelines for what you can do to improve your user experience design — and, as a result, increase your payment acceptance rate.

So, let's take a look at some best practices for the conversion-boosting design below:

Form Columns

Multi-column layout forms are generally difficult to understand and frustrate users. When asked for credit card information during the checkout process, however, putting multiple fields in the same row is acceptable because this structure resembles the layout of the actual credit card.

So, if your current best online payment gateway does not allow you to customize your checkout form to accommodate this design principle, you should look for one that will.

Number of Fields

Customers abandon their carts for a variety of reasons, including excessively long payment forms with too many fields. For example, for products that will be physically shipped to the customer, users should not be required to fill out a form with more than 6-8 form fields. Furthermore, studies show that the majority of firms have twice as many fields.

Reduce the number of fields your customers must fill out to increase the likelihood that they will complete the transaction.

Field Arrangement

To increase your chances of increasing your payment acceptance rate, arrange the form fields from easiest to most difficult and time-consuming to fill out.

Users will be less likely to abandon their carts if they don't hesitate to fill out the form at first. Once they get to the more difficult fields, they'll likely already feel committed to the process.

Auto-Fill Forms

Use the auto-complete feature to make the form filling process faster and more convenient. Fields that automatically fill out certain pieces of information for the customer speed up the checkout process, lowering the risk of churn and cart abandonment.

Optional Fields

Because there are more required fields than optional fields on average, consider only marking the optional ones (by adding "optional" outside or inside a given field).

This communicates to the user quickly and clearly which fields they need to fill out and which they don't. Furthermore, this helps to ensure that users' payment attempts through your online payment gateway are successful on the first try.

Radio Buttons

According to a recent study, people complete forms faster when they use radio buttons rather than multi-select ones.

When there are fewer than five options in the form, radio buttons are more practical because it is much easier to scan for information when it is immediately visible.

Dropdown menus are preferable when there are many options to choose from; otherwise, radio buttons should be used.

Promo Code Fields

When it comes to the promo code box, a general best practice is to make it virtually invisible — that is, hide the box until the user clicks in the appropriate place or uses a text link. This works to avoid the situation in which a customer sees the box and immediately assumes that if they don't have the code, they are missing out on a special offer.

On the other hand, if you use promo codes frequently, this might not be the best option for your business. Use this principle only if you rarely offer discounts.

Clickable Images

People process visual information much faster than text, and graphic images are more engaging than text; as a result, consider optimizing your payment forms with clickable images. This increases the likelihood that a user will check all of the necessary boxes without error, resulting in a much smoother — and more successful — checkout experience.

Progress Bar

Including a progress bar can aid in preventing cart abandonment. This is especially true if the form is lengthy and spans more than one page.

Progress bars work because customers feel compelled to finish what they started when they see how much time and effort they've already invested in filling out the form.

Checkout Performance

According to one study on speed and performance, 50% of users will not wait more than 3 seconds for a page to load. Your pages should have a response time of 0-1 second to ensure a higher conversion rate.

To assist with this, declutter and streamline your checkout form — remove unnecessary elements, avoid redirecting customers to other pages, and keep the number of form fields to a minimum.

Unique Design

Aside from being fast, your checkout should also look good — and, most importantly, it should match the layout and overall design scheme of your website. Customers may feel uneasy about filling out a checkout form that is visually out of place.

Call to Action

Don't underestimate the importance of clear button messaging. When in doubt, always go with the simpler version of the button copy you're thinking about. Users must understand exactly what will happen when they click that button.

Clear Pricing

The customer should always know how much they're going to pay, so make the final price visible throughout the checkout process.

Mobile Payments

Giving customers the option to make purchases using their mobile phones is another way to increase your payment acceptance rate.

But keep in mind that simply having a mobile checkout option isn't enough. The mobile form should be as simple to use and fill out as its desktop counterpart. As a result, it should be fully mobile-compatible and include an in-app checkout.