Online merchants urged to focus on mobile payment solutions

Online merchants are being urged to implement payment services tailored for mobile checkouts as more and more consumers in China and across Asia shop with their smartphones.

According to global payments outsourcing company Adyen’s latest mobile payments index, over a third of online transactions are now made through mobile, with Asian payment methods such as Alibaba-backed Alipay driving growth.

While many consumers used to conduct online transactions on PCs, which have a much bigger screen size and can display more information, the industry has since evolved, said Warren Hayashi, president for Adyen, Asia Pacific.

“[On a PC], typing in 16-digit credit card numbers, expiry date, billing address and all that isn’t that big of an issue,” said Hayashi in an interview with the South China Morning Post. “But a larger number of consumers are now making their transactions via a mobile device. It is a lot more difficult typing in the same information on [such a small screen].”

Adyen provides a payments platform for merchants to integrate into their online websites. The company supports over 250 payment methods, including Alipay, Tencent’s Tenpay, and Apple Pay.

The company’s data shows that 44 per cent of consumers who use Alipay to make payments on Adyen’s platform do it via a mobile device.

But while other payments platforms such as PayPal are more recognisable to consumers, Adyen prides itself on being invisible on that front. The company’s technology works behind the scenes to ensure that payments are processed successfully, including automatically submitting wrongly declined credit card transactions a second time so that it gets approved for the customers.