VB LIVE:
An international launch poses a million pitfalls if you don’t understand the nuances of the global marketplace. How do you maximize acceptances, decrease churn, and hold your payment provider accountable for your success when you go global? Learn how in the latest VB Live event!
Access this VB Live event right here on demand.
“Global payments is really complicated,” says Kevin Hennessy, Director of Digital Content at WorldPay. “So you need to make sure that you’re getting the insights you need — and holding your payment provider accountable to doing that for you. Are they actually driving value to make your job easier?”
Hennessy points to CVV verification as an example of a place payment partners should be advising their customers better. (CVV — Card Verification Value — is that pesky 3-4 digit number on the back of a customer’s credit card.)
“If you’re able to get rid of the number of invalid CVV responses that you’re getting from submitted transactions, you’re going to have a much higher top-line revenue growth and conversion on your website for new signups, which is what it’s really all about for subscription businesses,” he says.
The problem, he adds, is that most merchants are doing it all wrong.
“The way most websites have customers go through the CVV verification process as part of checkout is almost always done incorrectly,” he explains. “There are two common things that you can do to improve it, and those two little bits are huge.”
First: Stop declines before they happen
When a customer enters their credit card number, those first three or four digits reveal which kind of card they have: Visa, MasterCard or American Express, for example. The CVV should then also correlate to that number. The trick: Don’t allow the customer to enter CVV numbers that don’t match before the customer ever gets to the Submit button.
Second: Let them see what they’re doing
Too many companies star out the CVV number as the customer types it in, leaving customers to just hope they’re getting it right. A mistype means an auto-decline of that transaction. And mistypes are all too common.
“There’s no reason for companies to do that,” Hennessy says. “It’s under the guise of PCI compliance because you’re unable to store that piece of information–that’s against card scheme rules. But there’s no reason you can’t show it.”
And with just these two small tweaks, Hennessy says, you’ll see big results.
“It’s one of the biggest response codes that you get from issuing banks that is in our control,” Hennessy says. “Something as simple as that can really have the benefit of decreasing your decline rate by a couple of percent, which is extremely valuable.”
But that’s just one tiny tweak in huge number of moving parts you’re managing when you launch globally.
“There are a lot of key insights depending on the country and the payment method and the transaction amount that actually go into the likeliest outcome of that transaction being successful,” Hennessy points out. “Getting those insights from your payment partner rather than just happening to take what is going to be convenient for a development cycle or a batch upload can actually have a real impact on acceptance rates, which impacts top line revenue and decreases involuntary churn.”
And that’s really what you should be paying your partners for.
To learn more about how to maximize your payment partnerships and increase transaction conversions, plus why and how you should take a page from Netflix’s book, don’t miss this interactive VB Live event.
Don’t miss out!
Access this VB Live event on demand right here.
In this VB Live event,, you’ll:
- Provide subscribers with the right payment options at the right time
- Get users to pick the subscription option you WANT them to
- Increase payment conversion with an effective pricing strategy
- Create and execute a payments strategy that enables you to reliably scale globally
Speakers:
- Stewart Rogers, director of marketing technology, VentureBeat
- Derek Blatter, senior manager, electronic payments and fraud prevention, Ancestry.com
- Kevin Hennessy, director of digital content, WorldPay
- Wendy Schuchart, Moderator, VentureBeat
