Visa Inc. is rolling out upgrades to its Visa Checkout online payment service aimed at helping e-retail clients offer a more personalized and branded look to shoppers and, ideally, boost conversions.
During checkout on a retailer’s website, a pop-up box with an image tailored to the customer will show up. Retailers can upload images and associate them with purchases so that a female customer buying clothes, for example, might see an image of a woman trying on a pair of jeans behind the Visa Checkout lightbox.
“Retailers keep a library of images with us, and they say, based on what’s in the cart, ‘show image 127.’ They can use no art, they can use one piece of art. We float our checkout experience on top of that,” says Chris Boncimino, senior vice president, digital solutions at Visa.
The new Visa Checkout goes live for retailers in April, but several e-retailers have been testing the service for months, including women’s and children’s flash-sale retailer zulily Inc., No. 39 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide.
Zulily’s experience formed the base of Boncimino’s presentation at the annual eTail West conference in Palm Springs, Calif., last week. After his presentation, Boncimino talked about what worked for the retailer during testing.
“We noticed that every time we put in features on a product that have more of the merchant’s branding and look and their messages, conversion ticks up a notch,” he says. “In this redesign, we went for broke.”
Kevin Saliba, zulily’s vice president of strategic partnerships and business development, declined to provide figures about conversion rates or revenue tied to use of the revamped Visa Checkout. “We are pleased with the performance so far,” he says.
Boncimino says Visa built the revamped version of Visa Checkout last year but waited until after the peak online holiday shopping season to introduce it.
Other improvements coming to the service include a simplified signup process that integrates with Google application programming interfaces and a mobile feature that lets shoppers upload an image of a credit card to pay instead of manually entering a card number and billing address.
When developing the new version of Visa Checkout, Boncimino says Visa considered plenty of bells and whistles but while other customized features could have made the checkout process glitzier, they would not have enhanced the customer experience.
“I get requests all the time for exotic features,” he says. “Those friction-causing things that you put into the product thinking that you’re saving the day are actually hurting overall conversion.”
While he’s happy with the newly redesigned version of Visa Checkout, Boncimino says it will continue to evolve. “We’re not done. We’re also always looking at ways to take friction out.”
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