Planning
One of the first things to do is to look carefully at the market the e-commerce service will focus on, the demographics of its customers, the country or region, the popular payment methods for digital commerce, and so on.
Demographics
This is a key part of any business plan, but knowing who your customers are is especially important for digital or e-commerce businesses. After all, you will never physically meet your customers in the normal run of an e-commerce business, so knowing as much about who they are and what they are looking for when offering your solution is key to your business's success. Would it then not be sensible to also look carefully at how they pay and whether that method or type of payment can be applied to your checkout process? In South America and Africa, this is specifically important for any digital business to know since local payment methods are hugely popular and dominate several markets you may be interested in. Brazil, for example, now favors the amazing PIX payment type throughout both physical and digital commerce, whilst mobile money continues to command the most customers across the largest markets in Africa, with South Africa being the obvious exception.
Countries
Where you intend to roll out is worth spending a bit of time on here. The countries in the regions where CoralCommerce operates are all independent and unique in many ways, even if they look similar from the outside. Africa, for example, is not a country; it is a continent consisting of 54 countries and several independent territories at any one time. Each financial market within those countries and territories is usually governed by its own regulator, each mobile network subject to its own local license of operation and its own regulator also. It is important for brands to understand this, as these differences are often what cause failure or trigger anxiety amongst founders.
Mobile money, for example, across most regions and especially in Africa, has its own regulator, and payments through mobile money are always executed in local currencies only. This means a brand, payfac, or startup rolling out into these countries would need to plan for a more complex merchant settlement flow, where local currency settlements need to be transferred to an account or to accounts in their currency of choice. Limitations in cross-border remittances or payments also come into play here, as many countries across these regions have some sort of control in place. South Africa and Nigeria are two prime examples of tight forex controls.
Regulators
Another important part of understanding your market is to get a very clear understanding of the local regulations, without which you may not be able to operate. If you are accepting payments, you would need to know how to communicate to customers regarding their rights in the purchase flow, and you would need to understand your responsibilities in terms of taxes. Import and value-added taxes, for example, are key to understand as a foreign-owned business in these regions.
As a payment facilitator, you would need to know what local regulations you would have to comply with before accepting payments on behalf of merchants, from whom you need to register with, license with, and receive authorization from before trading. In South Africa, whilst highly flexible, you still need to have a locally registered licensed partner if you wish to accept payments, or you need to find a bank that would sponsor you to their local payment association and be licensed and/or registered for the payment model you wish to launch there. Other countries like Nigeria tightly control their payment infrastructure and licensed operators, so again, you would need to make sure these are known to you and accommodated in your planning and business model.
If you are accepting recurring payments for or subscriptions to a service or product as a merchant, you would need to make sure you fully understand the rules of operation in the countries you choose to roll out into. In America, this changes even from state to state; in Europe, it again is more commonly applied by the EU, but country by country, there are some differences; and in the UK, you may face one of the toughest regulators for distance selling or digital commerce, all of which shows that you do need to do your homework and accommodate their requirements completely. We have written more about those risks in the Payment Subscriptions - Preventing Churn post.
Building
When building your checkouts, try doing comprehensive user journeys first, as there are usually several flows through a payment checkout. Decide the payment types or checkout options for payment you wish to make available to your customers in each of the relevant countries you are rolling out into. Each of these payment types will set your customer off into a different flow or user journey with different steps, outcomes, and even different terminologies.
Between your order confirmation and your payment type segments, plan to inform your customer of the expected next steps they should see and, if required, ask them for permission to redirect their payment steps to your third-party payment processor if you are using hosted checkouts. This would prepare them for what differences they may notice when going from your e-commerce designed pages to the third-party platform of the payment processor. When using a headless integration to your payment partners, it still makes sense to over-communicate with your customer for every step you create between order confirmation and checkout.
CoralCommerce makes two sets of online or hosted templates available to our clients for their use and customization. These templates are fully editable since they are Bootstrap-style HTML/CSS/JS templates and can be changed by an authorized user who is experienced in creating basic web pages. The hosted checkout has a full library of these templates addressing every step possible within a standard payment checkout, including card tokenization, card store/wallet steps, 3DSec verification of cardholders, basic order confirmation page, order confirmation page with payment options, payment pages for all payment types, user permission or authorization for SSO, customer registration and management, email notifications, and so on. For the headless integrations where clients manage their own checkouts within their own environment, we have created technical templates for complex flows like in-line 3DS authentication for Payfacs and brands wishing to avoid the complexity of managing all the various stages presented by 3DS V2.x, including frictionless to challenge options.
Summary
Keep in mind what you experience during a checkout on your favorite websites or apps, as well as those times you churned because something about the checkout concerned you. Build your checkout user journey to accommodate those concerns and fears, as well as those likes and loves you had for the different checkout flows you may have experienced in the past. Customers like uniformity when it comes to checkouts, a single design flow that is not jarring when it moves from the order confirmation page or step to the payment execution pages or steps and back.
Customers do not like the unexpected during payment checkouts, so accommodate the periods where redirection is occurring by informing the customer beforehand of what they should expect. Over-communicate and, if possible, customize ALL the pages or steps in the checkout flow that your payment processor hosts on your behalf or you drive yourself, to help your customer experience as close a design to your own website or app as possible.
You are always welcome to chat with us if you need assistance or help in resolving any of the checkout design challenges you may experience.