Your PSP tracks performance. So does your finance director. They are not looking at the same numbers. When your PSP talks about performance, they typically mean uptime, processing speed, and settlement reliability. These are operational metrics. They matter, but they...
Are you overpaying your PSP?
Most merchants accept their PSP invoice without scrutiny. Here is how to read what you are actually paying, what is negotiable, and where the money is going.
PSD2 and PSD3: what Dutch online retailers need to know now
PSD2 has been the regulatory backbone of European online payments since 2019. Strong Customer Authentication, 3DS2, transaction risk analysis exemptions, by now most Dutch online retailers have absorbed the friction and adapted their checkout flows accordingly. But...
Payments are essential, but they are not where the transaction is won
In many organizations, payments are receiving more attention than ever. There are ongoing discussions about new providers, new technologies, and increasingly sophisticated ways to optimize performance at checkout. Concepts like routing, orchestration, and...
Unified Commerce Payment Solutions: Opportunities and Challenges
Retailers who sell both online and in physical stores are increasingly confronting a structural problem with their payment setup: two separate worlds that do not talk to each other. Online, they have a PSP with a payment page, a 3DS flow, digital wallets, and iDEAL....
iDEAL 2.0, Visa and Mastercard Debit, wero: what these changes cost you as a merchant
iDEAL 2.0 is going to cost merchants more than traditional iDEAL, and that is just one of three simultaneous shifts reshaping payment economics in the Netherlands and beyond. Mastercard Debit and Visa Debit are replacing Maestro and Vpay at speed. EPI is pushing its...
Why an interim payment specialist can be valuable for your company
Most retailers have a payments setup. Few have a payments strategy. The difference matters. A payments setup is what you have when a PSP was chosen at some point, a contract was signed, and the system has been running since. A payments strategy is what you have when...
When top-line growth stalls: how Dutch retailers are finding margin in payment costs
Does your online revenue growth feel a little exhausted? You are not alone. Online sales in the Netherlands grew 24% in 2021, followed by a 5.8% decline in 2022. Since then growth has been modest and uneven. The post-COVID tailwind that made top-line growth feel...
Your checkout process starts long before the payment page
Most merchants treat checkout optimization as a payment problem. It is not, at least not entirely. The checkout process begins the moment a customer clicks "order" in the shopping cart, and for most of that journey, your PSP has no influence whatsoever. Understanding...
Online checkout optimization
Every merchant knows that checkout is where conversion happens or doesn't. What fewer act on is that checkout is also where customer relationships are built or lost. Speed is the entry ticket. Everything beyond that is where the margin is made. Online checkout...
Replatforming your e-commerce? Don’t forget the checkout
In an ecommerce replatforming project, the payment layer is consistently the most underweighted workstream. It is also the one where a mistake costs the most, because it sits at the exact point where you convert traffic you already paid to acquire into revenue. I have...
Use gamification techniques in the checkout process
Roughly seven in ten carts never convert. Baymard puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.22 percent, and that number has barely moved in two decades despite better technology, better devices and better design tools. The product has been chosen and the price has...
Tokenization: the road to zero-click, secure payments
Frictionless payment is no longer a differentiator. It is the baseline customers expect, and the moment a checkout asks too much, conversion leaks. Tokenization is the mechanism that lets you remove that friction without weakening security, and done well it does more...
Contextual commerce: what it means for your payment setup
The traditional customer journey has a clear structure. A consumer discovers a product, visits a website, adds it to a cart, and completes a checkout. Every step is deliberate, and every step is a potential drop-off point. Contextual commerce breaks that structure. It...
Are you leaving money on the table with your payment solution?
Most merchants are, and most have no idea by how much. Not because they made a bad decision, but because the payment setup that was right two years ago quietly stops being right. Volumes grow, the cardmix shifts, new methods appear at checkout, customers move to...