Why your users don't pay: considering main reasons for declined payment
Business owners, especially in gambling industry, spend a lot of time and investments on attracting users. Eventually, bringing target user to a gambling website is becoming more and more difficult and expensive every year. At the end, up to 70% of potential players do not complete first deposit, leaving the website at payment stage. Understanding the reasons why it happens is the number one task for business owners and payment team. Let's take a closer look at common problems most often leading to declined payment and prevent first-time visitor from becoming your loyal user.
Long and complex payment process
The first blocker is multi-step registration. Users most often prefer not to spend time filling out long registration forms, confirming data by email. If creating an account takes more than one minute, the process is worth reviewing. Especially important to evaluate the real need for requesting unnecessary information precisely at the registration stage. Requesting tons of additional data for the first deposit, such as date of birth, address, phone number, can scare away a potential player.
Also, complex website navigation is a stop factor for making first time deposit. An unclear website structure, confusing menu, and absence of step-by-step instructions for all target actions can lead to payment refusal. As a result, business faces loss of a payment-capable audience and decrease in payment approval ratio. General deterioration of the user experience also negatively affects already existing player base and can lead to a serious decrease in loyalty and retention.
How to overcome:
- Simplify payment process: reduce the number of registration steps, limiting them to only the most necessary information. Offer registration through social networks or email to simplify the process for user, but not lose needed data.
- Improve usability: the process here is practically endless. Any new feature on the website should undergo testing and verification for navigation. Checking the website is especially necessary for confidence in successful approval ratio for first-time visitors.
Lack of trust to your brand or payment system
Usually, questions about the legality of website may arise if basic necessary information about company is not located at the right place. If users cannot quickly and easily find details of the entity, its documents, and contact information, logically they may question legal grounds for the brand's operation.
Being trustworthy is one of the most important features of iGaming website that players pay attention to, when choosing a gambling operator. So, presence of negative reviews about your website and company can also have some influence. Among regular gamblers, chats and forums are quite popular. There players can share their gaming experience on different websites and recommend or even warn against interacting with particular operators. Therefore, each business owner should monitor their reputation and maintain it at the proper level.
Also, an unreliable payment system can be also trigger for low level of trust from users. Implementation of really questionable payment systems, absence of payment security guarantees cast a shadow of doubt on the transparency of money flow. The consequences of wrong decisions in this regard can be both loss of users and decline in the reputation.
How to overcome:
- Place information about your company so everyone can see it: provide detailed information about the company, its history, achievements, legal documents, and contact information.
- Use reliable payment systems: choose only proven payment systems that guarantee payment security.
- Work with reviews: respond to customer reviews, solve problems, publish positive reviews.
Hidden fess and additional charges
Every online casino owner decides whether it is worth charging fees from their players for deposits or withdrawals. However, if such a commission exists, please make sure that you duly inform about it. Don’t try to hide this information in small print, make it noticeably clear on the website. Hidden fees and non-transparent policies will sooner or later become revealed and this may ruin your audience trust. Building a clear relationship at the very first stage is something to strive to. Every player carefully choses website for spending time and of course looking fees-free places. However, if you charge the fee but provide spectacular service and inform timely about all conditions — you can still be the best option.
In addition to the obvious disadvantages of unfair player policy, it’s worth to consider potential drop in approval ratio. Because as soon as user realizes that he is incurring additional costs (for example, he suddenly sees an increased amount at the checkout), he may cancel the payment and thus create an unsuccessful payment attempt in your statistics.
How to overcome:
- Clearly indicate final amount to be paid: displaying the amount taking into account all fees and additional charges will allow you to immediately build trusting relationships with the player, and this is where loyalty growth begins in the future.
- No hidden fees: do not add hidden commissions for payment at the card data entry stage, it is better to summarize all payments before this. Otherwise, such a "surprise" can be perceived negatively.
Technical issues
Flawed operations of payment system, errors during payment process, or frequent crashes of website overall are the most popular reasons for declined payment and pose the most serious obstacle on the way to a successful deposit.
This also includes a long page loading time, incorrect operation of mobile version of your website. And if you don’t have quality support service 24/7, it grows into a business-scale disaster. The inability to get help in case of issues will immediately hit the reputation of brand and, of course, approval ratio of payments.
Undoubtedly, technical issues can lead to the loss of customers, as they usually prefer not to waste time trying to complete payment if it does not work out right away.
How to overcome:
- Regularly test: constantly test payment systems and website itself to identify and fix errors before your users notice them.
- Use reliable hosting providers: this way you can be sure about uninterrupted operation of the platform.
- Provide 24/7 support: round clock support service is literally the face of online casino. However, it’s often an underestimated source of communication with the audience. The feedback to your support team is always the most honest — use it.
- Pay attention to mobile version: develop a mobile version and adapt it to all popular devices so that users can easily access your website from any phone or tablet.
Uncomfortable design and poor usability
In gambling business, website design often stays in task backlog for a long time. More urgent tasks related to game content or even payment system integrations come first. Even more: many websites are made in the same design and type, without considering convenience of this option for end user or relevance to modern trends. Thus, the market is overflowing with complex websites having outdated design, whose navigation is too far from simple.
If this is common situation for you when players cannot find necessary section — information on the website is poorly structured. Another significant disadvantage is unreadable text: the font is too small, text is poorly perceived, color scheme is uncomfortable for the eyes. Also, poor-quality images that are not adapted to all devices will lead to the loss of potential users.
Here worth considering the region of operation and better to rely on habits and preferences of local population of this particular country. If the website is designed to be international, you need usability experts to adapt it to international standards but localize, where necessary. So, then you can to meet specific requirements of regional audience and stay cool for everyone at the same time. If this issue is not addressed in a timely manner, the growing mass of problems can even paralyze operation of entire business.
How to overcome:
- Conduct a usability audit: knowing about the problem is the first step to solving it. Therefore, you need periodically organize website checkup for the most common issues in the flow.
- Simplify navigation: stick to the position "the simpler, the better". Do not create complex multi-step processes that the user will have to go through. At the end of the day, you try to deliver a relaxed time spending, not a competition with your soft.
To sum up, a lot of things have to be taken into account when building effective payment flow. Be sure to consider that payment systems do not exist in vacuum, but interact with all parts of your gambling product. It can be difficult to navigate this issue without making irreparable mistakes, so constant learning would be the right approach. Monoup team consists with professionals in payment design and structure, with significant experience in gambling and other high-risk verticals. Contact us, and we will help you set up processes so that your payment systems work for you, not against.
