Black Friday 2022 and Cyber Monday: get your business up to speed
Prepare your business for Black Friday 2022 with these ten tips
Do you want to shine this Black Friday and Cyber Monday? We’ve compiled all the information you need to optimize your checkout and ensure your payment procedures are agile, reliable, and fast.
Here we go:
#1 Analyze the performance of the previous Black Friday
Before you start setting up your marketing and sales strategy for Black Friday 2022, you must analyze the results of your strategy on the previous Black Friday to detect possible friction. A good statistic to do this is your cart abandonment rate. Say you have a multi-step checkout and notice that many people abandon their purchases at step two (shipping, for example); you know your shipping methods aren’t up to par with your customer’s needs.
Detecting the points of improvement in time and adjusting can help you maximize your sales volume by creating a better user experience - which can help you position your webshop better.
#2 Offer an extensive payment mix in your checkout
Offering the correct payment method can make all the difference. It’s rather low-hanging fruit, but not providing iDeal in the Netherlands, or Bancontact in Belgium, can ruin your chances of securing a conversion. Especially on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, ensure the right payment methods are there for your target audience and market.
To know which payment methods are the most suitable for your business (= customers), you have to pay attention to your target market and which payment methods are your users’ favorites. Having a payment service provider well-versed in your market of choice will save you valuable time, and smart solutions can help you set up your checkout, so you’re not doing manual work per market.
Segmenting your payment mix per market can help you build trust and facilitate transactions. In the last couple of years, Buy Now, Pay Later has become increasingly popular, as well as digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. We recommend you keep an eye on these and make sure they’re represented in your checkout.
"Having different payment methods in your mix that go beyond credit or debit cards, such as digital wallets or Buy Now, Pay Later solutions is critical to your success – especially on Black Friday."
Philippe De Vydt, Head of International Sales at MultiSafepay
#3 Incorporate recurring payments - tokenization
We already mentioned removing friction. One way of removing friction is integrating recurring payment technologies, such as tokenization, into your payment system. If you haven’t yet, this Black Friday 2022 is an excellent time to incorporate one-click payments into your business.
Tokenization is the process of saving sensitive payment data in an encrypted fashion, but how can it help combat friction exactly? Besides just saving data, so you’re not the one holding all the sensitive data, it also adds a one-click purchase to your checkout. If a customer has entered their data once, upon their next visit, they’ll be presented with the tokenized payment method. With just one click, they can choose that payment method, authorize, and finalize their order.
Customers can often carry out recurring payments through payment methods you already have in your payment mix, so there might not be the need to add more payment methods; it’s just a matter of using them correctly. If you’re not using these technologies, contact your payment provider.
#4 Black Friday 2022 and new trends: a winning combination
Ecommerce never stops. If you’re running an online shop, it’s important to always be up-to-date with all the new trends in the market, if you want to stay relevant going forward. Being able to implement the latest trends for Black Friday can be an integral part of your success. Not integrating these services while your competitors do offer them can be a big con for your business, some of the main trends you should consider this Black Friday are voice commerce, geo- targeting, and address intelligence.
Curious to find out more about these trends? Download our free ebook and get all the details.
#5 Keep your integrations updated
Making sure you’re using the latest version of your integration and platform can differentiate between a conversion and a failure. Developers are continuously updating their integrations, regularly releasing improvements to safety and the user experience. If you’re not on the latest version, there’s a higher chance you’ll run into issues.
On a day like Black Friday, you want to ensure that won’t happen.
We recommend you keep your integrations up-to-date, making sure you have access to all the latest features, such as new payment methods or conversion-boosting features, such as Second Chance emails or tokenization. The result is a better overall shopping experience, which you’ll notice in your sales.
#6 Automate your cash collection with E-invoicing
Imagine your billing system is not customizable and scalable to different sales volumes and scenarios like Black Friday; the manual work you’ll have to do to ensure the aftersales procedures are running smoothly will be a nightmare. Making sure your invoicing is smooth and automated will mean the difference between a nightmare and a dream.
Luckily, we have just the thing. Our E-invoicing solution gives you the tools to create and automate your billing procedures - without coding knowledge. Everything can be arranged with a simple interface, accounting for various billing methods and integration types.
#7 Exemptions to SCA to boost your conversion
Some acquirers, like MultiSafepay, have the ability to have more control over transactions. By performing a transaction risk analysis (TRA), we can determine if a transaction is low risk, and therefore choose to exclude it from SCA.
When a transaction qualifies for the TRA requirements and becomes exempt from SCA, the need for two-factor identification is removed, meaning the transaction becomes essentially a one-click purchase. The removal of two step verification cuts down checkout time and boosts conversion significantly.
Additional options a merchant can pursue with an acquirer as their payment service provider:
- Whitelist – Customers can assign businesses to their whitelist. Whitelisted businesses are exempt from SCA requirements, no matter the transaction amount.
- Low value transactions - Transactions under €30 are also exempt from SCA requirements. Once every five transactions the customer will still need to authorize their payment.
- Merchant-initiated transactions, or recurring payments, are also exempt from SCA. The payment flows for recurring payments are not instant, and the customer details have already been provided in the past. The only point when SCA is required here is for the very-first transaction.
- B2B payments made directly between two companies are exempt from SCA, but only if the payment method is a dedicated B2B payment method and the authorities determine the associated procedures are secure.
- One leg out - The PSD2 directive does not force entities outside the EU to abide by its standards. This means that if a European merchant has (for example) a consumer from the US in their store, there might be some complications when the European PSP tries to apply SCA authorization to the transaction, as this does not exist for the American consumer. To avoid these circumstances, acquirers like MultiSafepay can choose to exempt these transactions from SCA and retain a high percentage of successful international transactions.
#8 Reinforce your customer service for Black Friday
With a larger number of sales, you’ll also find more complaints and returns. Therefore, you must ensure your customer service is up to par for this important day - ensuring you have the proper procedures to manage and process complaints and returns.
Things to consider:
- Add a frequently asked questions section to your website to reduce unnecessary questions for your support department.
- Integrate automated payment links in your confirmation emails, and make them accessible to be shared by phone or customer chat (through our dashboard, these links can be easily generated and sent).
- Introduce a virtual IBAN for your webshop and reduce unnecessary questions for your customer support. A virtual IBAN changes the name on refunds to “Your webshop – by MultiSafepay”, instead of something that the merchant doesn't instantly recognize. Read our case study to learn more.
Black Friday plays an important role in ecommerce. Besides boosting your revenue, it's a key moment where you can stress test your systems. If there's one moment where you'll find out what you and your partners are capable of, it's Black Friday.
Manuel Mesa, Business Development Manager at MultiSafepay
#9 Choose a payment partner that is both acquirer and processor
With sales almost tripling in many regions on Black Friday, you want to make sure you’re ready to process high volumes. With these increasing volumes, the payment network will be used more intensively than usual, potentially resulting in outages and periodic downtimes, costing you a great deal of money.
To minimize this risk, you must use a resilient payment flow. An acquirer and processor has a more direct influence on the payment flow, which means they can create better payment procedures for you, and help you get back up and running quickly.
Example: an outage in the verification for credit card payments led to a significant disruption in credit card payments. Due to our status as acquirer and processor, we were able to switch the verification to a different version, which meant MultiSafepay merchants were back up and running shortly, significantly faster than their competitors.
#10 Think internationally
Ever process transactions outside the borders of your country? International ecommerce is becoming more popular, and ensuring you’re ready to process international payments can help boost your Black Friday turnover.
Besides tuning your payment mix to local markets, there’s also the aspect that comes after the payment. If someone from the UK buys something, can you process GBP? It’s worth investigating whether your business can process currencies such as the yen, pound, or zloty to manage international payments effectively.
Make sure you have a payment partner that offers you currency management and allows you to automate the withdrawal of funds and conversion to avoid errors in refunds and chargebacks in case they occur.
Get ready for Black Friday 2022 with MultiSafepay
As experts in diverse payment ecosystems, we have been helping thousands of customers optimize and scale their online stores since 1999, thanks to our local and global payment systems and our ready-made integrations developed by our team.
If you want to refine your payment strategy, contact us, and our specialists will help you make the best decision for you and your business.
