Monetizing payments is a way to turn the transactions that flow through your software into a valuable source of revenue. But to get users to become your merchants, you need a frictionless payments experience that offers the same quality as (and even more convenience than) your competitors in the traditional payments space. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to do that when your expertise lies in making great software, not providing payments.
Your users want speed and convenience. To meet their expectations for a modern payments experience, it’s important to make accessing services faster and to give users more control over how, when and where their payments journey happens.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways you can provide that elevated payments experience without the need for deep payments expertise or costly, time-consuming development.
The Merchant Experience Challenge
As a software development company, you’re intimately familiar with the importance of user experience (UX) and how good and bad UX impact success and failure. The same is true in payments. Today’s merchants expect payments to be an invisible part of their operations. How well you deliver that experience will have a huge impact on your success.
Everything from sign-up to integration, payout, reporting and support has to be as frictionless as possible to minimize the time and effort required from users. The problem software companies face is that the skills and knowledge that go into designing world-class UX don’t automatically translate to designing a frictionless merchant experience (MX). But, maximizing the value of your payments monetization requires both.
Key Areas to Target to Improve MX
MX is a unique subset of UX, and it’s hard to get it right if you don’t have deep experience in payments. So, what can you do to ensure that your users enjoy the best possible experience across the entirety of your offerings, including your payment services?
Two of the most important areas you can focus on are:
- Onboarding Speed: How fast users can access payments services
- Self-Service Enablement: How much control users have over when, where and how they interact with payment services
Onboarding Speed
Onboarding speed determines how quickly your users go from signing up for payments services to actually being able to use them. It’s a background process that’s easy to under-prioritize, but it has a huge impact on your users and your bottom line. But onboarding doesn’t end with initial sign-up. It also applies to every new feature a user engages with.
Scenario 1: A user signs up for your payment services. How long does it take to get their application to your partner, complete underwriting and issue a merchant account so they can start processing? And do they have to re-key information you (their provider) already have?
Scenario 2: A user decides they need advanced fraud protection. How long does it take them to request the service, turn it on and begin using it?
Ultimately, the payment services you sell come from your processing partner, so there are aspects of onboarding that are out of your control. Your job as the front-end provider is to optimize and streamline the parts of the process you can control. That means designing your sign-up flows to be as frictionless as possible and choosing a payments partner who can provide you with the fastest possible service activation.
How Onboarding Speed Benefits Your Users
Payments are a critical part of your users’ operations. Any delay in the services they need represents a business interruption. That impacts them and potentially their end customers. The ability to access payment services quickly and without friction makes their lives easier and, in cases like fraud prevention or data security tools, keeps them protected.
How Onboarding Speed Benefits You
The faster your onboarding processes are, the faster your users can start processing transactions. Time-to-processing for them is time-to-revenue for you. But fast, frictionless onboarding is also an expectation of today’s merchants, and failing to offer it puts you at a competitive disadvantage to the big platforms that do.
Self-Serve Enablement
In the digital world, convenience is king, and users increasingly expect easy, convenient ways to serve themselves whenever and wherever they need to. Research has shown that over two-thirds of customers prefer self-serve support to engaging with a company representative, and almost half look for answers themselves before reaching out to support.
As a payment provider, that means your users expect to be able to sign up for, use and manage their payment services without having to reach out to your team for assistance.
Scenario 1: A user wants to add a new payments service. Can they sign up or enable it without being forced to engage in a sales process with a member of your team?
Scenario 2: A user needs to activate a new payments terminal. Do they have to create a support ticket and engage with an agent to do it? If so, there is too much friction.
This self-serve aspect is an important part of what makes the industry’s biggest payment platforms so popular. Your users expect it, so you need to look for every opportunity possible to put more control and more choice directly in their hands.
How Self-Serve Enablement Benefits Your Users
When done well, self-service speeds up and simplifies things for users. It gives them a level of control over processes and timelines, as well as the satisfaction that comes with solving their own problem. All that adds up to an improved merchant experience. But self-serve is only beneficial if it’s both easy and effective.
How Self-Serve Enablement Benefits You
A better experience creates stickier merchants that will stay with you longer and generate more lifetime revenue. In the short term, self-service reduces the load on your sales and support teams. That enables them to provide higher-quality services to the users who seek it out, and it lowers your costs, making payments more profitable.
The Importance of Single Log-In and One-Stop Centralization
Successful payments always require far more than just a merchant account. At a minimum, it also requires a payment gateway. In many cases, it requires hardware for in-person sales. Depending on where and how your users sell, they may also need additional services like:
- Advanced fraud protection
- Data tokenization
- Off-site card storage
- Automatic card updating
- Accounting integrations
- Billing support and more
The more vendors a user has to engage with to meet all those needs, the more complex their payments journey is, and the poorer their experience. So, it’s extremely important that you offer as many payment services as possible.
But even offering your users everything they need isn’t enough. To really stand out, you also need to offer it all through a single, centralized user interface, with a single portal log-in.
It’s not uncommon for a merchant to use four or more different portals just to handle their essential tools and processes. Learning and managing those multiple systems is a major friction point for merchants. The result is a fragmented workflow that slows things down, increases training complexity, sends support requests through the roof and severely degrades satisfaction.
When designing your merchant experience, a wide set of services, fast onboarding and extensive self-serve options are critical. Offering it all through a single interface (whether the portal is embedded directly in your software platform or is a partner-provided white-labeled experience) is the key to unlocking a truly great MX.
The Full Merchant Journey in One Portal
NMI Payments features a single log-in merchant portal that enables SaaS providers to give their users a complete, ready-to-use payments experience without any major development and minimal ongoing support — all with their own branding.
This portal acts as a hub for your merchants’ payment services, providing centralized, self-serve control over:
- Gateway services
- Application program interfaces (API) setup and management
- Value-added service connection, integration and management
- Customer network and gateway token creation and management
- New hardware enablement and payment device management
- High-level reporting and data review
- Virtual terminal access
With NMI Payments, your merchants can streamline their payments, access services faster, manage themselves with less dependence on support and maximize the value they enjoy from payments.
For you, it’s a turnkey way to offer an elite merchant experience that rivals the top platforms, makes your users stickier and maximizes average lifetime revenue, all while minimizing your support load.
To find out more about NMI Payment’s unified merchant interface, reach out to a member of our team today.