The point at which a member pays on your website is a vital touchpoint.
It’s where members commit and what drives your revenue so it’s crucial to give it the attention it deserves. Your members are now obtaining products and services from many organisations, both personal and professional, in seamless digital ways. Their experiences with companies from Netflix to Spotify influence their expectations of your website.
As a membership organisation you should be reviewing your online payment process throughout your key member journeys. Ensuring an optimised back-office experience for those within your organisation who manage and report on your payments is also crucial.
Reviewing your online payment process: 4 Key things to consider
1. A seamless member journey
Your checkout journey should be consistent as well as being intuitive and easy to use. Your payment page should provide a consistent approach from a branding perspective as the rest of your website. It should not redirect to a separate URL for payment entry, it should be clear what the amount to be paid is, where data should be entered and when a transaction is successful.
What to look for:
- Hosted fields allow you to easily incorporate compliant payment fields into your website to ensure consistent branding
- It keeps members on your website rather than redirecting to a different URL, without the need to build a unique page with complex compliance requirements and responsibilities
2. Security features
Security of information and data is more important than ever. Ensuring proper security processes are in place is key to building trust, reducing risk of reputational damage, decreasing failed payments and removing regulatory impact. Compliance can add costs and complexity if you don’t know what you need or don’t have a provider that can support you.
What to look for:
- PCI DSS Level 1 compliance means your payment provider has been verified by Visa as meeting the requirements that ensures card data is stored, transmitted, and processed to the highest standards
- 3D Secure 2 is the latest mandatory authentication protocol for online card payments to combat fraudulent transactions whilst ensuring a smoother user experience, particularly on mobile devices, to reduce abandoned checkouts
- Active fraud monitoring protects your organisation against fraudulent transactions to reduce chargebacks and reputational damage
3. Back -office Payment Administration
The member’s experience is vital, but your back-office employees matter too. Your payment solution should make your life easier by reducing the number of manual steps, accounts and work needed to manage and reconcile payments. Optimise and automate your processes within your CRM to make things simpler.
What to look for:
- Embedded into your CRM so that you can manage your payments without having to leave your CRM, switch to another account or export and upload data between software
- PCI DSS Level 1 compliant so that you only have to do the minimum amount of paperwork to attest your compliance each year
4. Platform Scalability
If you have plans for your organisation to grow, you should identify a provider that can scale with you. Make sure you choose a provider who can offer the payment channels you need now, as well as being able to provide, or even better let you input into, the ones you may need in the future.
What to look for:
- Multi-channel payment solutions so that you can implement the channels you need now, whilst being able to leverage other payment opportunities easily in the future without needing to have multiple providers, contracts and data portals
- The provider is willing to learn your requirements to ensure their payment solution grows with the needs and opportunities of your organisation and sector
Find out about our embedded payment platform ClearAccept.
