Adyen’s Personalized Checkout Tweaks Payment Options

Any bump up in an e-commerce site’s conversion rate could ripple through the merchant’s financial results. Processor Adyen NV hopes its new Personalize checkout service can aid these rates by enabling merchants to customize payment options for individual shoppers.

Adyen says Personalize, a part of its Uplift payment optimization suite, lets online merchants adjust their checkout pages in real time based on an individual’s shopping preference, which could make it easier for consumers to pay and potentially reduce merchants’ processing costs.

“Personalize solves the challenge of the lack of flexibility for online checkout because it allows businesses to adapt their payment experience before they reach checkout,” Carlo Bruno, Adyen vice president of product, tells Digital Transactions News via email. “…For consumers it creates less friction during the payment process and for businesses, it optimizes their options and Dynamic Identification mitigates the risk often associated with faster checkout.” Dynamic Identification is a behavioral model of trust built from trillions of interactions across Adyen’s single global platform, which is strengthened with each transaction, Adyen says.

In one example of Personalize, a U.S. shopper who regularly uses a credit card for online purchases may be presented with the option to pay with Google Pay, based on his or her past use of the digital wallet. “…We know they have used Google Pay in the past and therefore we can nudge them to use the wallet instead of manual card entry,” Bruno says. “This reordering eliminates the window of second-guessing, makes checkout faster, while driving conversion. Digital wallets can show up to 10% better conversion rates in the U.S. market compared to traditional cards broadly.”

A Norwegian shopper who often uses Vipps, a popular mobile payment app in Norway, despite their preference to use a credit card online, can be identified within Personalize as highly likely to convert with either method. “By defaulting to Vipps, the system secures merchant cost savings on the transaction while maintaining a seamless conversion path,” Bruno says. Vipps often has lower processing costs for merchants than credit cards.

Bruno says these types of adjustments are automated based on the consumer’s transaction history. And, merchants set the parameters for Personalize. “Merchants can choose to exclude certain countries where they want to retain manual control over their payment method layout. On top of that, they can also select an optimization goal—cost or conversion. Adyen shows merchants where they can reduce costs and helps them do so. The Personalize model optimizes for cost saving, without hurting their conversion,” Bruno says.

This type of personalization is essential to payments, especially for e-commerce, suggests Eric Grover, principal at Intrepid Ventures, a payments consultancy.

“Adyen’s ‘Personalize’ product makes eminent sense,” Grover says by email. “Based on device and connection fingerprinting and an immense trove of global payments and shopping data, they have a good idea but don’t know who the potential customer is and what their preferences are. Adyen can, therefore, customize the checkout and payments experience to the (likely) customer’s preferences and risk profile and thereby boost conversion and trim payment acceptance costs. That’s a plus for merchants and consumers.”

Grover suggests this type of personalization of an individual’s shopping preferences may support the notion of a one-to-one marketing strategy. “Marketing strategists Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in their seminal book ‘The One to One Future’ in 1993 evangelized the concept of 1:1: marketing—the idea being that firms and consumers would profit from businesses providing highly personalized services, vying for ever greater share of each customer. With real time access to enormous volumes of consumer data and processing power, Adyen is helping [to make] Peppers and Rogers’ vision a reality.”