Flow: A clever bit of code that helps you boost conversions

In today's fiercely competitive online marketplace, every click at checkout affects conversion rates. In a world where 87% of online customers will abandon their cart because of an overly complicated checkout process, technology decision-making is business critical.

Yet, achieving optimal conversion rates is a multifaceted challenge, compounded by diverse payment preferences across different regions, security concerns, and ever-changing regulatory requirements. It's a delicate balancing act – one where even “minor” friction points can lead to lost sales and damaged P&L. 

Consider this: a staggering 55% of consumers have abandoned a checkout page simply because their preferred payment option wasn't available. It's a statistic that highlights the critical importance of optimizing every aspect of the checkout process.

Today, Checkout.com is excited to launch Flow, a customizable payment interface designed to help you boost conversions, simplify compliance, and enter new markets fast. Everything we've ever learned about payment integrations is put into this product: helping you to reduce checkout friction, and easily add new payment methods as your business grows. All while keeping pace with the latest security and compliance standards.

In plain English: taking payments is about to get much, much more efficient.

Optimize your conversion 

Flow comes with a bunch of built-in optimizations that streamline the experience for your customers with the goal to reduce checkout abandonment.

Out of the box, you'll get:

• Dynamically adapting payment methods based on your customers' device and location. Flow offers the right options at the right time, ensuring a smooth checkout experience that presents customers with the payment options they’re most likely to use. Flow dynamically sorts and filters payment methods, so customers can pay exactly how they want to, enhancing satisfaction and boosting conversion rates.
• Automatic collection of customer information that’s required for alternative payment methods like the account holder name for Multibanco or the email address for Przelewy24.
• Input masking and validation to show your customers example input data in each field, guiding them to enter the right information in the right format.
• Intuitive error messages to steer users towards successful transactions. For instance, informing the user when specific card schemes are not accepted or to use an alternative payment method if their card payment has been declined.
• Smart defaults automatically ensure payment request fields are optimally set based on contextual data. So no incomplete payment requests get denied for missing data, giving every transaction the best chance to succeed.
• Responsive design that enhances user experience and accessibility by dynamically adjusting layouts, content, and interactions across various devices and screen sizes.

Reach new markets with a scalable solution

We know that 50% of merchants see sales significantly underperform in new markets when they cannot activate local payment methods. When your business is ready to expand to new regions, Flow ensures your payment methods can expand with you. Instead of hand-coding each new APM integration, you can switch on new payment methods upon request; it’s payment method integration via configuration not code.

That means you can spend less time on repetitive engineering processes and more time on executing your business strategy.

Customization to match your branding

Studies of consumers have found brand consistency is linked to a perception of brand quality. Brand loyalty can strengthen “if a marketer can make the brand seem like a person,” and the people that we tend to trust are consistent in how they present themselves.

For that reason, it makes sense to align the digital payment journey with your business branding as a whole. If your brand has an identity, a set of colors, a chosen font set that contributes to its overall look and feel, this should be as consistent as possible across all customer touchpoints. That includes, believe it or not, the checkout process.

With Flow you can tailor the appearance to reflect your brand identity effortlessly. With appearance customizations, you have the flexibility to adjust colors, fonts, borders and more to match your desired look and feel. Whether you prefer the convenience of our out of the box style or require complete control, the choice is yours to ensure a branded experience for your customers.

Keep your payments safe

With PCI DSS 4.0 in effect since April, it’s high time to ensure your digital payments are compliant. That said, it’s always a good time to ensure your payment processing is as effective and secure as it can be.

Flow keeps pace with the most recent security and compliance standards, streamlining the process of achieving PCI compliance for your business. By securely collecting and tokenizing sensitive payment information, Flow eliminates the need for your direct handling of such data. Meaning that integrating Flow simplifies your PCI compliance scope to SAQ-A.

Plus, Flow makes sure your transactions are safe by using device fingerprinting to identify and prevent fraud. It automatically identifies suspicious behavior, such as irregular IP addresses or identities linked to prior instances of fraud, then sends the information to the Checkout.com fraud monitoring systems to ensure accurate fraud filtering.

Streamline your payments with Flow

To stay competitive, it’s vital to maximize conversion rates at checkout. Flow helps you do exactly that. Read the docs to take a closer look at Flow; you can find our demo there, too. Our expert payment analysts can kick-start your journey with Flow, and support you as you scale your business globally. 

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback—we’d love to hear from you.