How To Drive Adoption of Your Payments Solution

Generating merchant adoption of your in-platform payments solution is a critical factor in achieving success. To get your merchants to adopt your payments solution and start processing payments through you, you have to be able to sell them on the benefits of an integrated or embedded payments solution.

Communicate Key Benefits

Consider what your merchants will enjoy from your payments solution, for example:

• Ease of access from directly within your platform
• Ability to accept more payment types helps generate more revenue
• Consolidated payments data and reporting saves manual time spent on balancing accounts 
• Added security from features like tokenization and transferred liability for chargebacks offers extra protection to your customers

Offer Industry Specific Features

For vertical SaaS companies, consider the industry specific needs that payments-as-a-feature may be able to address for example:

• Ability to create recurring payments for merchants who use subscription/recurring based models i.e. gyms, childcare, education
• Ability to add “Pay Now’ buttons to invoices if you offer Invoicing/Billing solutions
• Multiple fee profiles to allow for customised pricing i.e. lower rates for pensioners in Medical/Dental industries

Leverage Your Existing Channels

Be creative about how and where you can communicate with your clients about payment features:

• Consider a product-led approach where you display popups and advertise your feature directly within the platform 
• If you want to be extra savvy, try gamifying some of your payment features
• If you have an email base, you can send an email communication inviting your customers to try out the features
• Incentives work well in terms of creating urgency; could you offer a small gift card to customers who sign up?
• Consider offering payment features at no upfront cost; you will likely generate more revenue just by getting them to use the feature and process payments than you would by charging for the feature

Guide Them Through The Signup Process

Signing up for payments can take time if your client needs to gather paperwork and provide evidence for their business. Make it easier on them by supporting them through this process:

• Reduce friction at the beginning of the process by allowing your merchants to complete a web form or click a button to register interest in payments
• Pre-fill applications with information you have on hand
• Turn the onboarding process into bite sized chunks, and offer guidance along the way
• Send reminders to help people complete their applications
• Leverage digital applications where possible to minimize delays

Educate Them On How To Get The Most Out Of It

Provide education and tips on getting the most out of payments:

• Communicate with your merchants about how to protect themselves against fraud, what to do if they experience a chargeback, and how to protect their payments data
• Promote new payment types to merchants and encourage them to grow their range of options 
• Help them promote online payments and new payment types to their customers also 

If you partner with a payments provider, they will do some or most of this for you. Some will even allow you to pick and choose where they communicate with your customers, helping you to fill in the gaps in your resources and internal capabilities.