Black Friday and outages – of networks, websites and banking systems – are almost synonymous because systems crash during that time under the deluge of discount-seeking shoppers.
While local businesses have learned to plan much more effectively over the years, the spectre of payment gateway and website downtime still looms large for ecommerce site decision-makers.
Enterprises looking to get ahead of the curve this year in their Black Friday preparations need to ask their payment providers some hard questions, says Andrew Pillay, head of international sales at Peach Payments.
Redundancy
The critical element, says Pillay, is redundancy: “If a business is sending all of its payment requests to a single bank and the bank’s infrastructure gets overloaded, the payment will fail. Ideally your payment gateway should be able to send a transaction to a different bank if the first one is unavailable for whatever reason.”
The ability to switch banks proved invaluable to a large local online marketplace a few years ago, when one bank’s payment interface buckled under the pressure of shopping volumes.
More than that, Pillay says, if customers’ attempts at processing a payment fail, the gateway should be able to re-process the order via a different payment method.
“During Black Friday, it’s imperative to be able to offer customers a range of different ways of paying, without making them go through the order process again,” he says. “This prevents the sale from being lost.”
Conversion rates
Redundancy in payment methods ties into another critical aspect of Black Friday sales figures: improving conversion rates. Businesses spend a lot of money to get people onto a website to buy products, but if they’re not actually checking out their basket, what can be done?
This is where remarketing should be built into the customer journey, Pillay says, to entice people who may be dithering – or waiting for even just a small additional discount – to complete the purchase. Enterprises should double check that their payment platforms can assist with this process, he says, and activate payment platform modules that facilitate remarketing.
After Black Friday
Pillay says business leaders tend to focus on couriers and delivery issues after Black Friday, “but spare a thought for Accounts departments that have to reconcile payments into the business’s bank account with dispatched orders”.
This can be a nightmare because Black Friday volumes push the whole business into overdrive, including the back office. Pillay identifies bank reconciliations as one of the biggest challenges faced by any online business, particularly when faced with a deluge of Black Friday transactions that have to pass muster with auditors.
“Make sure your payment gateway plays nicely with your accounting system, and double-check with your staff that they are receiving the information they need to do their jobs. This will prevent Black Friday from becoming an accounting black hole,” he concludes.