A new era for payer experience

Collecting payments is the lifeblood of any business. The difference between winning or losing a customer. That makes payer experience mission-critical to business survival. 

To truly understand payer decisions, we partnered with YouGov to survey 8,507 consumer and business payers from across the UK, US, Australia, France and Germany. The detailed findings have all been collated to form our Demystifying Payer Experience Report.

The report deep dives into payer preferences and the influencing factors behind them across different use cases, payer types and geographical region. Whilst we recommend downloading and reading the report to find the areas that are most applicable to your business, we wanted to share a few of the key takeaways.

Do you understand your payers?

67% of payers will stop an e-commerce purchase if their preferred payment method isn’t available. It’s easy to think that the quality of goods or services sold is the main influencing factor for your customers - but that isn’t the case. People will look at the whole checkout experience and they could easily abandon the process at any stage.

Your business should offer the payment mix that your potential customers want as a strategy to win them over. But what factors do payers consider when choosing a preferred payment method?

Using the survey results, we discovered that the top three reasons a payer chooses a payment method for both invoice and e-commerce purchases are:

1. Security

2. Ease of use

3. Money leaving the account right away

The security of someone's data was the top consideration when making an e-commerce purchase, however, what people perceive as secure vs what is actually secure is not necessarily the same. For example, 26% of consumers will choose credit cards for their e-commerce purchases despite the fact credit card fraud is at its highest point in five years. 

You need to tailor your offering to your customers

When it comes to payment options, we can see that one size does NOT fit all. Choosing payment methods that are favoured by more payers should have a positive impact on their completion of a purchase at the checkout. 

Bank payments were the number one preferred way to pay for invoices by:

• 54% of business payers

• 25% of consumers

Meanwhile, e-commerce payers feel differently about payment methods. E-commerce payers favour credit cards the most:

• Credit card 26%

• Digital wallet 25%

• Debit card 22%

For a deep dive into how payers typically choose to pay for different types of purchases and why, check out the full research in Demystifying Payer Experience. 

While e-commerce payers often opt for cards, one in 10 payers are selecting bank payments. The option of bank payments being used for e-commerce purchases has only recently become a reality, thanks to open banking. We expect the demand for it to grow over time as it becomes more widely available and it's the option that best meets e-commerce payers’ expectations. 

There’s an appetite to try new payment methods

We learnt that over three-quarters of payers would only use a familiar payment method at the checkout. Whilst this is a significant number, businesses must note that this doesn’t mean payers are completely against any form of change. 36% of payers said they would try an unfamiliar payment method if it appeared to be more secure than the alternatives.

Other reasons people would try new ways to pay included; if a payment appeared to be simple to use (16%) or provided a faster way to pay (9%) - aligning with how they prioritise their choices when making a payment. 

Payers being willing to try new, safer and easier methods is good news for businesses as it means you aren’t tied to older, more expensive and less reliable methods. 

The future of payer experience

We asked all businesses about their plans for investment in payment infrastructure. 68% of large businesses are looking to invest in their business’ payments infrastructure over the next two years.

Just under half of the medium-sized businesses agreed that they have plans to improve their payment offering. But for small businesses, this figure drops to just under a quarter sharing that they’re likely to invest in their payments. This indicates there are concerns over the upfront costs of making changes, but not adapting and innovating to payer needs could cost much more in the long-term. 

Of the businesses who are planning to invest, just like with payment preference, the choice is driven by a culmination of factors.

The top three reasons are:

• Keeping up with market trends (20%)

• Keeping up with competitors (18%)

• Reducing payment fraud (17%)

What payments mean to you

Payments play an integral role in business. That makes it difficult to ignore the behaviour, preferences and demands of your payers when it comes to how they choose to pay. 

With an appetite for change and better payer experiences, the future looks favourable for those who adapt to benefit their payers and will inevitably future-proof their business in the process.

Get your copy of the report now

For more insights into how businesses and payers choose to pay, and why and how you can benefit from offering the right payment methods to your payers, get your copy of the Demystifying Payer Experience by clicking here.