How to turn raw payment data into actionable insights

Did you know that you can be charged with theft for picking up money off the street? It may seem weird, as it’s just something valuable laying in there, unclaimed and unused. The thing is that it still belongs to someone, and keeping others’ lost cash is illegal.

But what if we tell you there’s something precious staying out of your sight that you can use for your own good, and it’s actually yours, so there would be no trouble?

Behold, it’s payment data. It may seem useless itself, but it hides countless opportunities to optimise and grow your business. Let’s pick this treasure up and learn how to benefit from it.

What is payment data?

How to analyse your payment data?

In order to analyse the payment data, you need to collect it. For this, your business has to accept or make online payments.

Captain Obvious

Any business that receives or makes online payments has plenty of data to analyse. For this, start by identifying all your sources of payment data. Typically, you can access this data from your payment dashboard.

But what if you work with several different payment providers?

It means you have several sources of payment data information, which raises particular challenges. First, you have to log in to several dashboards and get the data from every system. Moreover, every payment service provider represents the payment data in a format of their choice, meaning that the data sets from different vendors may vary.

If that’s the case, you can bury yourself in disparate data and try to standardise it manually or analyse different datasets separately. But life’s too short for that, and there are more efficient options to choose from:

• Use a third-party data analysis software, like Tenner or Tableau, to conveniently aggregate and normalise your data for further analysis.
• Partner with a payment orchestration platform like Corefy. Besides bringing together all your data from all the providers you work with and normalising it, the platform multiplies your payment capabilities and allows you to grow and scale up much faster.

Two approaches to payment data analysis

Now that you have the software, wait for it to aggregate the critical mass of payment data to work with. It may take some time if your payment flows are moderate. Then, your software can turn the raw data into palatable graphs and visualisations. Alternatively, you can export your data from the system as autogenerated reports and use them for analysis.

Larger businesses can also benefit from real-time payment data monitoring and analysis. If you process dozens of transactions every minute, the ability to monitor them allows you to detect possible issues or customer behaviour patterns and handle them proactively.

Which metrics to analyse and why?

There’s no point in collecting the payment data if you have no idea how to interpret it and work with it. We want to give you a hand. Below, you’ll find the most vital payment metrics explained. There’s enough runway to take your data analysis efforts off and unveil the hidden opportunities.

Conversion rates

Conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete the desired action, most commonly — a purchase. Corefy provides so many perspectives on calculating conversion that we jokingly say there are fifty shades of conversion. The ways our clients can monitor their conversion rate include:

• By the project, to benchmark and determine which one performs best.
• By the customer, to detect users who reach the payment page and don’t pay.
• By the provider. The success rates for various transaction types may vary from one payment service provider to another. It depends on various factors, including currency, time, payment method, card brand, etc. This breakdown helps unveil the most efficient processors for all transaction types and use this information for payment routing.
• With enabled and disabled CVV/3DS authorisation, to evaluate the necessity of the friction caused and strike a balance between security and conversion.
• In real-time mode, to proactively monitor current performance.
• Over a selected period, to analyse past performance, etc.

Payment methods stats

By analysing conversion rates and usage statistics per every payment method you’ve connected, you can ensure your selection of provided options is optimal and sufficient for the particular market. It also allows you to save costs by eliminating the need to support methods your customers don’t use.

Corefy provides the conversion rate breakdown by payment methods a customer used. It allows our clients to display the best-performing options at the top of the checkout page for each returning customer individually.

Decline reasons

By collecting and analysing transaction statuses statistics and error codes, you can unveil issues preventing payments from successful completion. What’s more, you can easily separate the decline reasons that require actions on the user’s side from those you or your payment service provider can fix.

Decline reason stats help improve the success level and avoid abandoned shopping carts by working with customers or payment providers. With Corefy, such information is available to you in real-time mode, and our Customer Service representatives are always ready to help you solve any issue occurring.

Authorisation rates

By analysing your authorisation rates, you can determine which bank or payment provider is best at processing certain transactions and route these transactions to them. It is handy for international businesses, as sometimes their payment system may not be optimised for particular markets.

Additionally, a low authorisation rate for an issuing bank may indicate you or your acquirer don’t send sufficient information or have a bad risk profile with this bank. Corefy allows viewing error codes per specific terminal to take relevant actions.

User behaviour on the payment page

Access to the statistical information about what users do on your payment page provides you with underrated but precious insights. Knowing how long a customer is on your page and where they click can reveal UX issues that lower your conversion or even prevent customers from checking out.

Once, a quick look at user behaviour data helped us determine that one of our new clients suffers ~20% conversion simply because the payment page closes if a user misclicks the payment popup. Immediately after fixing this issue, our client reached over 80% conversion.

Transaction fees

Knowing how much each transaction costs you, you can set up a payment routing system to help you notably save on fees. For instance, a bank that issued a card is more likely to process a transaction on that card faster and cheaper than another. If you have terminals at various banks, a smart routing system will help you benefit from this fact. You can also integrate appropriate alternative payment methods if your transaction costs end up being too high. It is often an issue for cross-border card transactions.

Balances

Last but not least, pay attention to your balances at the payment providers you work with. Use this information for payment routing to avoid undesirable zero or too high balances and diversify your cash flows. If you use Corefy, we’ve taken care of it, and it all happens automatically. All you need to do is opt for the “By balances” routing strategy in the Dashboard settings. We also send our clients timely notifications when reaching critical balance value on their merchant accounts. Additionally, every client can export the balance report in a few clicks.

How can Corefy help?

Keeping track of your payment data be very lucrative if you know how to flesh it out. This article may be a great starting point for using the payment analytic’s power. Corefy’s Analytics solution and the expert assistance we provide will help you get the most out of your payment data. Get in touch with us to get started now.