How to crush peak season with a strong payment strategy

Picture this: Peak season begins and your business gets a surge of online (and/or in-store) traffic. Nice. 

But when it’s time to checkout, genuine shoppers can’t pay with their method of choice or your system flags their order as fraudulent. Not so nice. 

The takeaway? A smooth end-to-end shopping experience can make all the difference in your peak season success: 

• Our recent report found that 55% of consumers will abandon a purchase if they can’t pay how they want. By offering local payment methods, shoppers get a more personalized and convenient way to buy.

• Shopper behavior drastically changes during the busy season. Someone who’d typically place two orders a month can suddenly place five (or more). Rather than blocking these payments, update your velocity rules and use a machine learning tool to easily detect, prevent, and respond to real fraud — without disrupting the customer journey. 

• A full refund reserve ensures you have sufficient cash to meet customer requests. Goodbye, last-minute peak season stress. 

• Customers are four times more likely to buy from a brand with purpose. Integrating a “donate” option at checkout lets you sell your products and support a cause — a win-win. An extra perk? In November and December, Adyen matches all donations for new Giving campaigns. 

Managing payment costs is an emerging trend across industries, with many brands recognizing its importance to running a profitable business. 

And during peak season when transaction volume is high, optimizing your payments can help protect your bottom line. 

Whether you primarily sell online, in-person, or both, here are some ways to save big this year:

• Adopt bank and alternative payment methods — like digital wallets — which have higher conversion rates than card payments (and are growing in popularity too). 

• Use Intelligent Payment Routing — which automatically chooses the payment route with the lowest cost and highest authentication rate.

• For in-person payments, enable offline payments to accept transactions during system downtimes. This helps to mitigate payment costs and revenue loss.

• For online payments, implement network tokens to secure transactions and reduce costs with lower scheme fees. 

Whether it’s handling increased transaction volume, reducing downtime, or preventing fraud, a reliable financial technology platform is crucial during peak season. 

It’s the backbone of your payment operations — ensuring the checkout experience is seamless, consistent, and secure. 

At Adyen, we know how important this time of year is for businesses, and our platform is ready to help you succeed. 

How? Every year, our team analyzes previous peak season performance insights. Using this data, we:

• Predict expected volumes of traffic and buying behaviors — across regions. 

• Run internal and external tests ahead of peak season spikes. 

• Implement code freezes during peak days to ensure we’re at our most efficient.   

We also offer operational support, such as: 

• Round-the-clock support across time zones. 

• Reactive and proactive communications. 

• Frequent updates via our system messages and status page. 

As peak season approaches, having the right payment tools in place can make navigating this busy period a breeze. Happy peak week(s).