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Enhancing E-Commerce Success with Crowdsourced Payment Testing
Payment testing ensures e-commerce businesses can enhance the customer experience, increase conversion rates, gain confidence in local payment methods, and expand their global reach.
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Enhancing E-Commerce Success with Crowdsourced Payment Testing
Payment testing ensures e-commerce businesses can enhance the customer experience, increase conversion rates, gain confidence in local payment methods, and expand their global reach.
Addressing payment issues is crucial for the success and growth of your e-commerce business.
By offering diverse payment options, including local methods, you can create a more positive and memorable experience, build loyalty, and increase customer satisfaction.
A fundamental way to achieve this is to test in production environments, rather than relying solely on sandbox testing, as this helps to identify and resolve issues before they escalate.
By offering diverse payment options and proactively addressing such potential pain points, you empower customers to have a smooth and seamless payment experience, which reduces the need for customer service calls related to payment-related inquiries (such as the customer thinking the payment has gone through when it hasn’t).
Testbirds’ unique approach through crowdtesting enables comprehensive testing across global markets, ensuring a smooth payment experience. Let’s explore the challenges and opportunities for payments and the benefits of payment method testing.
What are the biggest payment challenges in e-commerce?
From payment security, limited payment options, complicated checkout processes, technical issues, a lack of mobile optimization, and unexpected fees and charges, customers have many concerns when it comes to online purchases. Addressing them is crucial for businesses to build trust, improve customer satisfaction, and drive conversions.
Let’s consider three of the biggest challenges.
1. Limited access to local payment methods in specific regions
Not being able to pay how they want can lead to customers losing trust, feeling frustrated, and inconvenienced. Let’s take a closer look at some of the problems that they can experience with limited local payment methods:
- If local payment methods are unavailable or there is only limited access, customers can feel inconvenienced and hesitant to proceed with the transaction.
- Lack of familiarity with international payment methods may raise trust concerns and discourage customers from proceeding with the transaction.
- International payment methods can result in additional fees and unfavorable exchange rates, leading to confusion about the final purchase cost.
- Customers may encounter difficulties when attempting cross-border transactions or using international payment methods, affecting their purchasing experience.
Testing capabilities need to be adapted and tailored to accommodate the unique characteristics of local payment methods. And realistically, if you can’t use China’s Alipay, GiroPay in German, IDEAL in the Netherlands, Interac in Canada, Paytm in India, or any of the hundreds of local payment methods around the world, it’s highly likely that any of your potential customers will look elsewhere. Diversity is the key to success.
2. Relying solely on sandbox environments for testing
To ensure robust and reliable payment systems, e-commerce businesses need to go beyond sandbox testing and incorporate testing in production environments. The reasons are clear. Sandbox environments:
- Do not accurately reflect real-world scenarios or capture the complexities and variations of actual payment transactions.
- Typically have limited integration capabilities with external, third-party payment systems.
- Often use simulated payment gateways or dummy payment processors. Real payment gateways, however, may have different protocols, security measures, and authentication processes.
- Do not accurately reflect the load and stress that production environments experience during peak times.
- Usually do not fully replicate the regulatory compliance requirements that e-commerce businesses must adhere to when processing real payments.
Overall, being unaware of testing possibilities in production limits the ability to identify and address issues, hampers risk mitigation efforts, impedes continuous improvement, and poses potential compliance and reputational risks. To overcome these challenges and ensure a robust testing process, it is essential to consider testing in both your sandbox and production environments.
By testing in a sandbox environment, you can validate changes, assess functionality, and catch potential issues before deploying to the live production environment. More importantly, testing in the production environment provides valuable insights into real-world scenarios and enables the detection of any unforeseen issues specific to that environment.
Embracing testing in both environments demonstrates flexibility and openness to the possibilities, allowing you to deliver a more stable and reliable product/service while minimizing risks. Of course, if you’re still finding bugs in both, it might be time to consider who is doing the testing!
3. Dealing with high-value transactions
When it comes to high-value transactions, especially in the context of fashion and luxury retail, there are a range of unique challenges when it comes to testing:
- Finding testers who can afford high-value purchases can be challenging.
- The availability of real payment methods and testers with valid payment information.
- Handling sensitive test data securely is crucial.
- Testers need to be reimbursed for their purchase and compensated for their participation.
Why payment testing matters: Understanding its key benefits
Payment testing helps provide a secure, reliable, and user-friendly payment experience to customers, which fosters trust, satisfaction, and loyalty. By proactively testing your payment systems, you can mitigate risks, comply with industry standards, and deliver a seamless payment process that meets customer expectations.
Here’s a quick look at three of the biggest benefits of using crowdsourced payment testing:
Discover real-world payment issues
Testing payments with real users is a crucial step in ensuring the reliability and effectiveness of your payment system. By conducting real-world tests, you can uncover valuable insights, address potential issues, and optimize the payment experience for their customers. When real people do the testing, they enable you to:
- Identify any usability challenges or obstacles that actual customers may encounter during the payment process.
- Assess the performance and reliability of the payment system under realistic conditions, which helps to identify potential bottlenecks, latency issues, or system failures.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of your security measures and fraud prevention systems. By closely monitoring transactions and analyzing patterns, you can discover vulnerabilities or loopholes that could be exploited by malicious actors.
The perfect fit
In 2022, Testbirds conducted extensive end-to-end Payment Testing for two online fashion sites, the first being one of the world’s largest luxury groups, the second a highly popular online fashion and lifestyle shop with a focus on beautiful but affordable fashion.
By bringing in carefully selected crowdtesters who closely matched their customers (from very high-end to bargain hunters), we were able to test their payments using real people making actual transactions (both big and small) with live accounts.
This quickly helped to validate their payments flows and processes, ensuring everything was secure, seamless, and perfect for their customer base – wherever they lived in the world.
Expand your payment methods
Testing payment methods is vital to ensure a seamless and reliable payment experience. By thoroughly evaluating the different payment methods available, crowdsourced payment testing helps you identify strengths, address weaknesses, and optimize your payment processes. This proactive approach:
- Enables you to truly understand how real people interact with various payment options, so you can optimize the checkout process, simplify payment steps, and offer a seamless and convenient experience.
- Helps you offer the most preferred and widely used local options, so you can effortlessly remove barriers to purchase and increase conversion rates.
- Allows you to better reach customers with a variety of tested payment options, including local or alternative methods, so you can tap into new markets, target specific demographics, and attract hesitant customers.
Confidently enter new markets
Knowing that your payment methods were tested in real-world conditions means you can be sure they’ll work and closely fit in wherever you want to do business, and that means you can easily overcome geographical limitations and be ready to take your business anywhere. Crowdtesting your payments helps to:
- Validate payment systems for seamless transactions in new markets.
- Ensure compliance with local regulations, currencies, and languages for a user-friendly experience.
- Identify and address issues to enhance customer satisfaction and boost conversion rates.
- Enables you to confidently offer various payment options to cater to local preferences and expand your customer base.
- Identifies and mitigates risks related to technical errors, transaction failures, and security vulnerabilities to protect your business and customers.
Carl Fryer
Country Manager, UK, Testbirds
"If your business is ever losing revenue, the first place to look at is the payment methods you provide, whether there’s a bug there.
With so much more competition now, you have to ensure your payment systems work because if they don’t, many of your customers will leave, which can be devastating to any business.”
How Testbirds can help
Our wide range of crowdtesting solutions can let you test locally, broaden your testing options, and secure the highest level of transactions – helping to ensure your payment solutions are reliable, secure, and user-friendly.
Here are the 6 steps that we’ll take together to help you develop an outstanding payments solution:
6 steps to secure and seamless transactions
Step 1
Identify target countries and their payment methods
Step 2
Develop a comprehensive test script with you
Step 3
Source and recruit local testers
Step 4
Testers make real transactions
Step 5
Testers provide feedback
Step 6
Fix payment method issues
1. Identify target countries and their payment methods: We conduct thorough market research to determine the prevalent local payment methods in your target countries.
2. Develop a comprehensive test script with you: Our team collaborates with you to create a test script that covers various payment scenarios, such as different methods (e.g. different values, order types, etc.) and potential error scenarios.
3. Source and recruit local testers: We actively recruit local crowdtesters in the target countries who have sufficient funds and can use local payment methods to make real transactions during testing.
4. Testers make real transactions: Our crowdtesters follow the test script and run through the payment journey on your e-commerce platform, making actual transactions.
5. Testers provide feedback: Crowdtesters provide detailed feedback on their experience with the payment methods used, including any encountered issues and suggestions for improvement.
6. Fix payment method issues: We analyze the feedback together with your team to quickly identify and address any issues or areas for improvement with your payment methods.
WHITEPAPER
Enhancing E-Commerce Success with Crowdsourced Payment Testing
Revolutionizing e-commerce payments
Payment issues clearly pose significant challenges to e-commerce businesses, impacting customer satisfaction, trust, and revenue.
However, by leveraging payment testing powered by our Crowd, businesses can proactively address and overcome these challenges by using real people in real-world conditions to identify and fix issues upfront, minimize customer frustrations, and maximize the potential for seamless payment experiences.
There is no better time to harness the power of crowdtesting. Visit Testbirds now and let your business take flight.
