Stripe x Shopware: 3 payment tips for a strong business

Three tips to accelerate your ecommerce amid economic uncertainty

Today’s business environment is undoubtedly challenging. Thriving amid economic volatility and a potential recession requires ecommerce businesses to go even further to win customers, provide an exceptional experience, and reduce friction, but determining how to do that isn’t always clear. Our partner Stripe has the right tips, offers insights from its payment study, and shows you how you can emerge stronger from the crisis with the new Shopware 6 Connector.

We are dedicated to helping businesses like yours excel – and our newest offering can help you not only pull through these challenging times but even grow your business. Together with Shopware, we’re happy to present the new Stripe Connector for Shopware 6.

The official Stripe Connector for Shopware 6 offers a global, flexible, and scalable integrated solution for payments. This upgrade supports over 40 payment methods and Link, the one-click checkout experience from Stripe. You can use this connector to easily and safely accept payments and grow your business even during uncertain times. To help you get the most from this new solution, here are three tips for success.

Tip 1: Expand your reach with popular payment methods

Shoppers’ payment preferences are highly region-specific and can impact your bottom line. Our recent study surveyed 870 customers across Europe and found that 95 % of customers say it is important for a website to provide the payment methods that are popular in their country. And 86 % reported they would likely abandon their cart if their preferred payment method wasn’t offered.[1]

Ensuring your business offers the right mix of payment methods is essential, especially in times of economic uncertainty, when it can not only sustain your business but even help your business grow and expand into new markets. With the Stripe Connecter for Shopware 6, you gain immediate access to more than 40 payment methods – and they’re available straight out of the box, with no additional integrations required.

The flexibility and diversity of payment options are important because payment preferences are varied, personal, and ever-changing. The payment methods your customers prefer might vary by region and demographic. The Stripe Connector allows your business to turn on payment methods and dynamically displays the most relevant payment methods based on your customer’s location and device. That means you can make it easier for a customer to complete their purchase by supporting the payment methods they’re looking for, whether those are local payment methods, such as Bancontact, iDEAL, or SOFORT, or buy now, pay later methods like Klarna, or wallets, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Tip 2: Optimize your checkout

When your customers reach the checkout, they’re likely excited to complete their transaction – their search is over and they’re ready to buy. But their experience at checkout can often mean the difference between a successful sale and an abandoned cart. For example, Stripe research shows 62 % of customers give up on a purchase after 2 minutes. In Europe, the average checkout time is 3.3 minutes.[2]

Some of the top issues that chase customers away are related to speed and convenience, such as a checkout form that lacks autofill capabilities. With the Stripe Connector for Shopware 6 you get access to one-click checkout with Link. Link saves and autofills your customers’ payment and shipping details across hundreds of thousands of sites. Our global checkout study showed that Link increases conversion rates by over 7 % and increases revenue for logged-in Link customers.

The Stripe Connector features built-in conversion logic, minimizing friction and errors with address auto-complete, real-time card validation, descriptive error messages, and third-party autofill capabilities.

The Stripe Connector helps improve your checkout in other ways, too. You can use it to:

Authorize payments and capture the total amount after shipping. This feature allows you to collect card information and ensure there are enough funds, while delaying capturing payment until later.
Create a responsive checkout for any device, so customers experience a simple, efficient checkout process whether they’re shopping on mobile, tablet, or desktop.

Offer Apple Pay or Google Pay, reducing the steps your customers need to take to check out.
Prevent disputes and protect against fraud, while ensuring that legitimate transactions go through. The Stripe Connector draws on machine learning trained daily on data from millions of global businesses to detect fraudulent transactions.
Customize your fraud protection with custom rules, allow and block lists, and access to advanced fraud insights.

Tip 3: Drive customer trust

With so many details to attend to, it’s easy for businesses to overlook one of the simplest but most important factors that can help turn a casual window shopper into a repeat customer: trust. Our study found that the leading reason customers perceive an ecommerce website negatively is that the site doesn’t appear secure or trustworthy.[3]

Instilling a sense of trust and dependability can improve your relationship with your customers and encourage them not only to do business with you, but also to recommend your business to others, building your brand’s reputation.

The Stripe Connector helps you build trust through consistency your customers can count on because it’s built on a platform trusted by millions of ecommerce businesses around the world – from new startups to public companies. Your business is always on, which means your customers rely on your site always. Stripe reduces unplanned outages by 81 % and delivers 99.999 % uptime, even with 500 million API requests per day.

Your customers also count on you to keep their sensitive data safe. A data breach can be not only expensive to deal with when it occurs, but it can do lasting damage to your brand image, costing you future business.[4] Stripe has processes and technology to safeguard both your business and your customers against data breaches, fraud, and security threats.