Slower transaction times mean lost customers and lost revenue. Literally.
Tyson Hackwood, head of Asia for PayPal subsidiary Braintree, said recently that reducing friction in the payment process is a key to payments success, which not exactly a secret. But he added in the video below that for every second a payment process takes, 12 customers abandon their purchase. This dynamic is presumed to be for payments through Braintree, although he didn’t say so specifically.
Braintree processes payments for Uber, Airbnb, OpenTable, Pinterest, Slack, and many more companies playing in the mobile space.
According to payment gateway Spreedly, which tracks transaction times of payment processors, the average Braintree transaction takes 1.6 seconds to process. PayPal itself takes nearly twice as long, 3.1 seconds, according to Spreedly.
That performance measure is the processing time after you click the “Pay Now” button. But, of course, there is other friction involved in payments, particularly the entering of data. Mobile dropoff rates, Hackwood noted in the video, are even higher.
Braintree lays out the “101” of payment processing in a video for e-commerce merchants released July 16. The video is interesting not just for the way it lays out a much-misunderstood process, but because it comes from the company that epitomizes “invisible payments.”
PayPal, Braintree’s parent company, went public on July 18.