Payments That Sizzle: How Your Industry Stops Checkout Abandonment in Real-Time

In a time when services can be delivered instantaneously with the touch of a smartphone screen (or the click of a mouse), it’s frustrating for many consumers and businesses when payments and money movement take days—not seconds.

When banks used handwritten ledgers, three or four business days to clear a check was understandable: in 2021, payment processing should be fast, painless and automated. If your company has spent millions on careful market strategizing and crafting top-grade customer experiences, why fall over the last hurdle when it comes to payment experiences?

There are plenty of reasons for cart abandonment, but it’s a simple enough matter to prevent some of the more common mistakes: a visual disconnect between the e-commerce page and the payment section, for example, can be avoided by using a white-label payment provider, so your branding remains on-message at every stage of the customer’s journey.

Additionally, unpleasant cost additions to the checkout total are a big cause of cart abandonment. Credit card surcharges are public enemy number one here and can be avoided by offering digital bank transfers that are low-cost and many times quicker than some of the alternatives.

Consumers and businesses are expecting faster fund transfers. The same technologies that empower vendors to provide faster payments are there to help a business scale and pivot into new markets and opportunities. Better sales means more revenue to explore new possibilities.

If the processes to make a payment are complex, expect to lose customers, both from potential technical errors in the extra steps, but also from customers simply giving up.

In short, payments have to be easy, and fast.

Delight Your Users, Decrease Your Churn

The art of payments reaches its height in the large marketplaces that exist throughout the world online. Multiple vendors congregate virtually, with consumers and businesses trading via complex platforms that require exacting payments in and outbound at a huge scale.

In this context, slow payments actively drive user churn, reducing marketplace operators’ revenues and creating poor end-user experiences. Manual payment processes drain internal resources, with more time spent on issuing checks and managing a spreadsheet instead of adding value to the company.

To delight customers and vendors alike, deploy real-time payments to ensure the lowest possible friction for all users, along with the ability for marketplace owners to offer new and imaginative ways for vendors to interact with their customers: pop-up specialty stores, loyalty programs and time-limited offers all drive traffic and commerce, but would be impossible at scale without fast payments and a first-rate payment technology provider.

Automating Your Repetitive Tasks

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Finance divisions worldwide are still processing repetitive tasks manually, eating up valuable resources and causing errors to creep into basic business processes (typically caused by bored or distracted staff). Without significant investment in human resources, a business can’t scale and respond to new challenges when staff are doing busywork.

Fortunately, today’s payment technologies help organizations address multiple problems with multi-functional software and systems. These systems can even integrate with existing tools like Slack or Quickbooks, to offer a more holistic approach to payments.

In today’s red-hot real estate market, for example, a single mistake in transferring earnest money into escrow can create delays and cause deals to fall through. Automated processing means mistakes are greatly reduced and all parties experience limited delays—delighting new users and encouraging repeat business from key accounts.

The same issues affect any company that lives and breathes by making timely payments outbound and having reliable recurring payment income. Insurance companies respond daily to companies and families in crisis. Significant reputational damage can be done by reimbursements failing because of errors in the timing of a payment. Along those same lines, a timely reimbursement to a policyholder can not only help during a time of need but earn a positive customer review—potentially earning new business.

The insurance sector is by no means unique in needing to ensure cash flow reliability: when monthly premium payments fail, it’s a significant burden for many companies to chase down expired payment cards, changes to bank details or new signatories to business accounts.

Additionally, every business commits significant resources to combat fraud, with painstaking manual processes picking through payment details for anomalies. These critical steps can be automated with today’s payment information systems, with edge cases being flagged by smart software for human checking. And while Dwolla does not provide this service as part of the Dwolla Platform, robust partnerships within the fintech ecosystem can make this a seamless experience for any business.

The ever-present specter of fraud costs companies billions, not necessarily from crime but from the needless drain on resources.

Real-Time Experiences Drive Adoption

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Many banks, financial institutions and e-commerce traders across Europe and Asia already offer faster payment services, with funds between participating companies moving instantaneously.

Organizations in the United States needing to offer a significantly better user experience will need to address issues like credit card surcharges, delayed payments and currency exchange fees. With real-time payments, Dwolla is helping companies make the change to smart, automated and low-cost money movements at scale.

With fast payments and features like the Dwolla Balance (think of it as a digital wallet), all supported by Dwolla’s partnerships with innovative financial institutions, companies can now initiate faster payments B2B and B2C. Even in complex marketplace chains of payment and payout, the emphasis needs to be on fast, resilient, secure and easy money movements.

Isn’t it time your business began to think beyond the five-days-to-honor-a-payment mentality and give customers and users the best experiences?

Thankfully, automating processes and creating responsive payment services runs through the ethos of Dwolla.

Learn more about the possibilities of tech in your financial division and how businesses like yours are gaining a competitive advantage with faster payments.