Is m-commerce the new e-commerce? Increasingly millennial and Gen Z consumers – as well as older generations – are turning to their smartphone for online shopping. With “buy” buttons on apps like Facebook and many others having a “one click checkout”, purchasing items on the move is easier than ever. In 2019, m-commerce comprised over a quarter of ecommerce sales in the US, having more than doubled since 2015.
And while customers expect the best possible experience when it comes to browsing and finding information such as reviews and high-quality visuals, they’re not keen on spending much time on the payment process. They expect it to be invisible and seamless. As Anthony Yeung, VP of Growth at Judopay puts it: “Payments have just got to work.”
Judopay was founded in 2012, with the firm belief that the payment process needed to be reimagined – not least on the growing platform of mobile. By helping businesses offer a payment process that is seamless on mobile, sales are maximised and customers will keep coming back for more.
Judopay partners with businesses, from SMEs to larger vendors and FinTechs, to help them fully understand and improve the payment process on mobile. Choosing the wrong solution may result in a suboptimal experience and inhibit future growth of the business. “After all, payments is strategic,” says Yeung.
There are four key areas that Yeung sees as vital to the payment process, and Judopay strives to improve. The first? Card. Currently over 69% of card transactions end up not completing so card abandonment is a pervasive issue. While some factors – human error, loss of focus or unreliable WiFi – are beyond the control of the business, Yeung explains that around 20% comes down to the payment experience. “It could be that the whole journey wasn’t good – you guide the customer through the checkout process but in the end they can’t buy what you want them to buy.”
Another issue when it comes to payments is trust – people want to feel secure when parting with their money, so brand damaging incidents like data breaches must be avoided at all costs. “People are very trust focused – if you see on social media a site isn’t safe, you might stop entering and buying from that site.”
Complexity within the market is the third item on Yeung’s to-do list. “Understanding all these different languages, payment methods and how things interlope is so important,” says Yeung. When Judopay partners with a business, it strives to speak the same language and make things as simple as possible. “Apart from a few FinTechs with big payment teams, the vast majority of businesses have no idea about the details and how it all happens; you shouldn’t have to think about all that if you’re a business or consumer – it should just work.”
Finally, regulation can be a key challenge for businesses. From PSD2 to SCA and all the acronyms in between, there’s a lot to think about when it comes to compliance. “We’re hearing that even global retailers are struggling to really understand the impact of PSD2. If that’s the case, there’s no chance for SMEs, so we have a problem. Again, we need them to understand but also not worry about it – we as service providers should be able to deal with that complexity and solve it for them.”
The growth of mobile commerce continues to be a focus for Judopay as it has grown and matured over the last eight years. Larger smartphone screens and displays mean more and more people make decisions solely with their device, foregoing a laptop or desktop altogether and purchasing from an app instead.
Those businesses that have created a brilliant ecommerce experience need to ensure it is seamless across mobile platforms, too – and not fall at the final hurdle when the customer comes to buy. “We are still seeing a huge amount of players in the market that just don’t have the tech,” says Yeung, adding that competition around mobile payments is hotting up from tech-led businesses like Booking.com and Deliveroo.
With m-commerce booming, business is going more global than ever, so converting cross-border transactions is a pain point Judopay will continue to focus on. Clients across the globe need to be supported in offering local payment methods, like IDEAL in the Netherlands. Yeung is also a big advocate of Apple Pay and Google Pay, commenting that people are three times more likely to buy something when an Apple Pay button is available.
“With the local payment methods, it’s a challenge for businesses to manage the processing cost involved,” he comments. “If we think about how processing certain cards can be more expensive, we can encourage users to not pay with certain payment methods by subtly moving where that button is, for example. It’s a way the vendor can say ‘Look, we’re a small business, we prefer for you to pay with the method that’s more efficient for us’, without taking away the choice.”
Mobile commerce over the past two years has soared and will continue to do so. Even before Covid-19 and its impact on mobile solutions as a whole, Forbes predicted m-commerce to grow 68% in the next two years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, FinTech is also a core sector for the business moving forward.
“The investment space is interesting as you see a lot more financial products come out,” he comments, citing Chip, one of Judopay’s clients that helps people automatically put money away. It’s also recently partnered with Evarvest, an investment product that creates a social media community where users share what they are investing in.
Moving forward, Yeung hopes businesses will see how the payment process can add far more than just a means of encouraging customers to buy. The data gleaned from the payment journey can be used as a strategic tool. “The more data you have, the more proactive you can be about managing fraud – at the moment a lot of providers are still quite reactive,” he comments. “With more data and insight, we can start helping our customers proactively manage fraud, so the whole scary thing about brand damage doesn’t become an issue because we can use information to prevent it.”
While FinTechs and their clients across the world do their best to make the process more seamless, it’s important to remember payments still hold a huge amount of value – even if it is invisible.
