Increase user payments rate up to 20%
Well, lets be honest here: all of this growth hacking stuff is, eventually, needed to increase a bottom line, right? Then, tell me, what kind of user is the most ready to pay?
Yep, the one who initiated payment! Surprisingly high percentage of users fail to pay when they want to: 30% is a typical case when I talk to my colleagues at the beginning of their growth hacking efforts.
Let me tell you a story about one “Order Ahead” app that simplifies coffee order and payment, so you just come to the coffee shop, coffee is waiting for you there, you grab it and go straight to your office.
They were starting to get complaints from some users, that their credit card is not accepted. Product growth hacker investigated this result and it turned out their payment processor does not handle MasterCard Maestro cards. The reason for this is that Maestro card is a special type of card which you can’t use for online transactions. You might consider this as a user’s problem, right? Nope! Typical user has 2–3 credit cards — any ideas how many of them tried their other (non Maestro) card? Almost noone.
The reason? The JavaScript that validated user input was not accepting Maestro credit cards at all (since they have 18 digits instead of usual 16), and gave no instructions that this is due to Maestro card type. Thus user had no idea what is the problem and how to solve it.
The end result when this problem was fixed: 20% increase in successful payments.
Lessons learned: check & investigate your error rates and make sure you display meaningful error messages to the user, so s/he could take action to finally make the payment (explain the problem, suggest to pay via different payment method & etc.). Don’t just sit & wait until some user bothers to tell you there is a problem☺
