Best Practices for Adding Mobile Payments to Your Application

Modern technology has quickly developed in the past decade to allow mobile payments instead of using a credit or debit card. Mobile payments are now an integral part of many applications. It is expected that this trend will continue with the increasing adoption of selling online.

Mobile payments have a significant impact on the overall user experience as well as on conversion rates. Adding mobile payments to your application is a great way to improve the growth of your app and monetize it. However, it is not easy to integrate a mobile payments feature into your existing app. This is where the need for a mobile payment integration specialist arises — someone who has deep knowledge of how to integrate mobile payments in your app and how it will fit in with its design and functionality.

Here are some of the best practices for smoothly integrating different payment types into your app — credit cards, debit cards, PayPal and others.

Plan and Test Well

To better understand your users’ needs, research and obtain all of the essential information for making mobile payments in your app. Doing so will help you know what to prioritize while developing and when making tweaks and improvements.

In planning, you must focus on your users’ needs. It would be best if you emphasize that mobile payments are there for more convenient and faster transactions. Help users avoid loads of data entry. Some things you can do are:

• Utilizing the phone’s camera for character recognition to reduce data entry;
• Providing an option to allow setting a primary card or payment method; and,
• Refraining from asking users of the card type since the first few digits of the card can identify the card type.

Also, before finally using the app, run numerous tests to make sure you do not run into issues. There are many free tools online that can help, like the credit card generator tool from AllFront. This credit card number generator allows you to test the payment form in the app you’re working on.

Focus on and Constantly Improve UX and UI

With strong UX and UI, you can have an edge by providing a positive user experience. The most important thing is to make the user feel natural and comfortable with the product. It is a way to increase conversion rates.

Design UX and UI in such a way that it feels good, less complicated or intimidating to the users. Here are some things that you should give more focus:

Beautiful Yet Easy to Use Design

The benefit of mobile payments is that it streamlines the process of keeping cash, wallets and cards in one location. Paying with a mobile device should be more convenient than paying with cash or a card in the store. That’s why a critical factor in the success of a mobile app is its usability and beautiful design. Even if it takes considerable effort to develop an attractive and easy-to-use design, revenue will follow if you create appealing mobile experiences that people enjoy using.

Provide Feedback

Provide confirmation and feedback to show the user the outcome and results of the choice and command they took. Feedback could be visual (text or animation), sound, or vibration pulses.

Provide Information

Let users feel in control of their finances by making the mobile payment section as informative as possible, providing options to review the information before payment submission, showing available balances and recording previous transactions.

Avoid Jargons

Use simple language and avoid tech and finance jargon when adding mobile payments to your application. Financial apps, in particular, are renowned for using complex terms from the financial and tech industry. Use familiar language that is concise and easy to grasp across different types of users.

Mitigate Security Risks

Mobile payments are one of the most popular ways to manage spending these days. However, to get more and more users on your app, you will need to add a secure payment feature or even use tokenized payments as an alternative.

The security aspect should not be neglected as you cannot ignore the hackers nowadays, and there are also many vulnerabilities in various applications and systems out there that need to be patched as soon as possible.

Use biometrics and multi-factor authentication for more mobile security. You’ve also probably heard about the migration to EMV, which stands for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa. This is a payment card technology that uses embedded chips to store encrypted security information. This has been in use for years to make credit card information theft more difficult.

Give Rewards

You need to add value to mobile payments in your app in order to encourage its widespread acceptance and high usage. This additional value could come in many forms, including monetary savings and loyalty points. These could help motivate users to continue using mobile payment methods.

Educate Users

Provide tutorial videos, guides and easy-to-navigate FAQs to guide users on using the mobile payment service on your app. This will help you do away with errors and undesired issues.

For example, users might have difficulty in adding credit cards to the app. This may be due to various authentication and authorization systems like Touch ID and Face ID. To overcome these difficulties and unwanted issues, you should first educate your clients about the types of security mechanisms available and let them decide which are the best fit for their needs. If they prefer a PIN-based security system or one with a predefined password, you should inform them about the availability of these options.