Mobile: Getting it Right for Payments

Written by Paul Barclay of Betcade.

Last month I had the pleasure of moderating an excellent panel on this very subject at the iGaming Super Show in Amsterdam, The Latest Mobile Payment Solutions. The panelists are all leaders and experts in this field:  Åke André of Devcode Payment, Mark Bell of Secure Trading, Maxim Ovchinnikov, ECommPay and Tim Van Diest of Adyen. As you might expect, they all had very strong opinions.

It’s a fact that operators have longer life time values with consumers that use their mobile apps, so you definitely want these consumers on mobile. How is this done successfully? Our panel’s expert opinion was universal: “you need to get everything right.” So what do we mean by everything?

First, get the UI right.

Without good UI, the rest of the payments experience won’t work, period. Ask yourself what it was like when you had a good online mobile buying or betting experience and, more importantly, when you had a bad one?

Also ask yourself was the navigation complex and difficult to understand? Was the registration or payment process difficult? Were there too many taps to get to the desired action? Were all of the forms perfectly clear or did you need to guess what they were asking for? Were the forms fields pre-validated so that you could see right away whether the information was right or wrong? Did the form preserve the information if you went back or forward?  Did you ever have the horrific experience of filling in a very long form and losing all the information because the site timed out or if password the used wasn’t long enough?

If your user experience was below par in any way, it is highly likely you either did not convert at all, or that the operator lost you as a customer shortly thereafter. Consumers have endless other options for entertainment, so you need to get it right with them the first time.

UI is a science. You need to have a strategy, and your strategy for mobile should not be separate from your strategy for desktop. But whatever you do, do not simply duplicate your desktop on mobile. Buttons need to be easy to tap and not too close to each other, and form fields need to be easy to select and fill out. Responsive design that adjusts to various screen sizes and orientation is standard now so be sure you are using it. It’s critical to encompass the rich diversity of devices, screen sizes, and processing power to deliver one universal, flexible experience rather than multiple separate experiences.

Your app needs to load quickly, and respond quickly to taps, scrolls and zooms. Developers usually have top of the line hardware so be sure you support and test on a variety of devices, including older devices and strained 3G or Edge connections. Mobile connections can be flaky and your server is not always available. Your app needs to take care of the user when this happens. Design your user experience keeping all of these things in mind instead of dealing with problems when they show up.

Money, money, money...

So we are now all experts at UI but what about the money? Let’s say you have done all of the above and the payment fails. Not because the consumer hasn't got the funds, but because the consumer has incorrectly entered their registration and payment details. This could be user error but it’s more likely that something on your side is causing this. What could have gone wrong?

After all your hard work and marketing, you’ve finally gotten the consumer to your registration page. Now that they’re here, is it in the right language? Does it offer the right payment options? Is the registration page clear, concise, and pre-populated? Are errors notified immediately?

Did you pre-check the data before sending for authorization? Can you pre-populate and check live input? Are you performing Luhn checks to validate the credit card number?

What if your consumer is a fraudster? What are you doing before you send them for authorization? What are your fraud tools and how do you use them? Do you make sure the deposit is trustworthy before you allow the consumer to do things like play poker where he/she can chip dump, or play games where you won’t be able to confiscate the money/winnings?

What is your plan of action when a customer fails to pay on your registration page?  How can you help? Do you get an alert so you message to get them back straight away? Live chat? If a transaction timed out on the customer’s device can it refresh itself when the connection is restored or is there is a risk that the player could be charged twice? What is your customer service set up to manage and is it in real time? Do you have live chat?

Build or Buy?

Now that we’ve covered everything that could possibly go wrong, on to the age old question: whether to partner or integrate all payment options yourself.

As an operator, it is definitely valuable to consider what you want as proprietary. You’ll need to evaluate your internal capabilities and resources. You’ll also need to make sure you have a team with experience, as well as knowledge and foresight around the numerous pitfalls you can encounter across: localisation, processing multiple currencies, payment licensing, and most importantly risk and fraud.

As you can see this is no easy task and there’s a lot to unpack from our blanket statement. And nothing is simple except this basic underlying rule: always think of the consumer and their experience.