Payment Page Design 101: Improving Success Rates

The payment page is the moment of truth. You’ve figured out your marketing channels, your messaging, and your sales team is on fire converting interested prospects into advocating ambassadors. So, it’s quite painful when a customer is about to make a purchase and abruptly abandons the checkout process.

Poor Payment Success rates are a raging issue and hurt your business even when you feel like you’re doing everything right. Let’s take a deeper look at cart abandonment and how an effective payment page UI design can increase your Payment Success Rates.

What is Payment Success Rate?

Payment Success Rate or simply put as SR is a north star metric for all digital enterprises. Payments SR is the percentage of attempted transactions that are completed successfully. It can be measured at both the order level and transaction level (an order can have multiple transactions).

Let’s illustrate this with an example. Consider a checkout page with an order ID, O1. A customer initiates a card transaction, T1, but cancels it on the OTP page. However, they try again with a different payment method, UPI, and this time the transaction is successful.

In this case:

• Order success rate would be 100% because the customer ultimately completed the purchase

• Transaction success rate would be 50% because only one out of the two attempted transactions was successful

Understanding and optimizing Payment Success Rates is essential for merchants to improve customer satisfaction, increase conversions, and ultimately drive revenue growth and payment page design plays a vital role in optimizing success rates.

When measuring the health of your payments infrastructure, transaction success rates provide better insight into what is working and what is not. To measure transaction success rates, you can use the following formula:

It’s worth noting that some payment aggregators/payment gateways may exclude certain failed transactions from the denominator, such as user drop-outs. However, this practice artificially boosts the SR and hinders the ability of merchants to identify and fix underlying issues.

Why is Payment Success Rate important for a merchant?

Companies spend a lot of marketing muscle, mind and money to get customers to the payment page. There is nothing more painful than a customer who abandons the cart due to poor payment experience - and once this user drops-off, the entire retention value chain starts with emails, Whatsapp messages, SMS, and personal notifications.

By optimizing the payment page design of the buying journey and ensuring a seamless payment experience, the Payment Success Rates naturally increase. A smooth payment experience becomes a tool for customer delight, encouraging customers to return for future purchases. Couple it with seamless refunds via instant payouts and you can really earn customer loyalty.

Now that we have established what and why, let’s dive into the levers that impact the Payment Success Rate of any transaction.

The Payment Success Rate is a function of great payment page design, which nudges and makes it easy for customers to pay, and great payments infrastructure that ensures payments are processed through the best routes to ensure Payment Success. Let’s dive into each of these levers.

Payment Page Design for Better Success Rates

Last impressions matter too. The Payment page is the last leg of the customer journey. And the experience there is all the difference between cart abandonment and a loyal customer. The payment page design corresponds to the design and feel of the payment page or checkout page, where you enlist all your payment options.

Now, let’s look at the sub-levers of a great checkout experience.

Clean & Simple Interface

A clean and intuitive UI reduces mis-clicks and, with the right messaging, guides users towards selecting a payment method that has a higher probability of success.

Latency or Loading Time

Ideally, the payment screen should load in less than 3 seconds after the user clicks on the call-to-action (CTA) button. Longer loading times can impact the customer’s intent and lead to transaction abandonment.

Native Payment Experience

Native payment experience means that your payment page UI design as well as the payment success page design follows your brand guidelines, simply put the payment page design follows the same look and feel of your website/app A non-native payment experience instills a sense of doubt in the customer’s mind about making the payment. Native UI, which blends well with the overall App/Website interface with respect to colour, font, size, shape, button style etc. - ensures higher trust and successful transactions.

The Order of Payment Methods

The order in which payment methods are presented also plays a critical role in influencing customer decision-making. For example, if your brand offers high-ticket items and customers frequently use EMI (Equated Monthly Instalments), it is beneficial to display credit/debit cards as the topmost option along with any available EMI offers. This increases the probability of purchase. Some merchants prefer showing all saved payment methods in a single container at the top for easier customer access.

Offering a plethora of Payment options to the customers is good as the choices are high, but the way they are presented matters a lot.

Understanding the Payment Page Design Flow

The Payment Page Design or Checkout flow corresponds to the overall payment experience after the customer selects a payment method on the payment screen and clicks on Proceed to pay button - This experience will majorly depend on the payment method type.

Let’s look into some of the best practices to provide better Customer experience.

Outage information

This is crucial information for both customers and merchants, as it directly impacts the success rates of transactions. If a payment method is temporarily down, it is important for the customer to get this information on the product page design before they select that payment method. In absence of this information, the customer would click the payment method and go through a bad UX, only to figure out that the transaction failed. In some cases, the debit notification might go to the customer and they will be hassled for all the wrong reasons - and buying the product by trying another payment method is the least of their worries.

Offers & EMIs

This is vital for merchants who promote specific payment methods based on agreements with banks, payment gateways (PGs), and networks or run specific offers. Showcasing this information on the payment page design and ensuring a smooth subsequent journey enhances the customer experience.

1-Click Checkout Flows

Lesser the clicks, lesser the chances for customer drop offs - it’s a maxim which is followed widely across the industry. Why? This is due the fact that if something involves less user-effort and lesser points of failure - the chances of the desired outcome are favourable.

In the payments space, this translates to 1-click checkouts - these experiences are indeed the best ones. You can integrate these experiences by enabling features like Direct-OTP, CVV Less Card transactions on Juspay Hypercheckout.

Understanding the Role of Payment Aggregators & routing in Transaction Success

Payment aggregators form the back-end layer of your Payments Infrastructure and play a significant role in deciding whether your transaction will be successful or not. Aggregators have different underlying gateways which perform better at various times due to their connections with other aggregators or banks directly

The underlying rails are fairly complex, and there can be multiple points of failure for a transaction, depending upon the rails that your payment aggregator has allocated to you. The payment can fail due to downtimes at:

• Payment Aggregator / Processor
• Payment Gateways connected to your aggregator / processor
• Bank-terminals connected with your Payment Gateways
• Networks like UPI network being down

Payment Routing

The best way to minimise this risk is to have a back-up payment processor / aggregator, and use a payment orchestrator, like Juspay HyperCheckout, you can route traffic suitably. In case of any downtime at PG1, the router will automatically route transactions via PG2. Learn more about payment orchestration here.

A mistake often made during analysis involves routing all traffic through one primary gateway while relegating secondary gateways only when the main option fails; this approach doesn’t allow for fair comparisons between alternatives.

Data will lead the way

You need visibility across your different Payment Gateways or Aggregators in order to make the most out of your transaction and customer behaviour data. Platforms like Juspay offer greater transparency than other aggregators for triaging problems more effectively. In addition, having access to industry-wide data from a large number of merchants helps us understand which gateway performs best for certain payments.

Better Success Rates with Juspay

Platforms like Juspay also give you an industry benchmark about your SR vs. industry leaders and competitors.

In addition, having access to industry-wide data from a large number of merchants helps us understand which gateway performs best for certain payments. While we may not directly recommend specific gateways, this information allows merchants to select those that work best for their needs based on performance at an industry level. We can also provide the best routing recommendations, which are customized for you on the basis of your volume, PAs, industry etc.

The availability of data in Juspay surpasses that of other aggregators and offers additional benefits such as SDK integration within apps. Juspay can provide user behavior analytics derived from SDKs which will enable clearer insights into customer drop-off points during checkout processes-leading ultimately towards improved overall experiences and conversion rates.