3D Secure Might Bust Your Conversions

There has been a recent campaign in the UK for nigh on a year now for eCommerce merchants to offer 3D Secure along with their payment gateway settings. One of my clients insisted that 3D Secure should be running against his site as he wanted to capture as many payment possibilities as possible (Maestro being the main target.) I obliged and then we watched, amazed as his payment conversions crashed at such a rapid rate.

What happened? Difficult to put your finger on the exact reason, but a large majority of blame lies at the way the 3D Secure payment pages work.

The above image represents the timeline of when the 3D Secure payment feature was switched on and when it was turned off. On average, day-to-day sales fell by around 60%. The traffic flow was constant during this period, and the flow charts show that the number going through the payment channels remained constant. It was when the customer was in the payment processing page they abondoned the sale. Quite a journey to abandon just at that moment, much like just scarpering at the checkout when your goods are being scanned at the local supermarket.

Sagepay themselves contributed a recent article where they touched on the problems of 3D Secure …

“3D Secure makes online payment safer than simply matching the AVS and CVV/Cv2 mechanism; however, the current system is perceived to be unfriendly to buyers, as it involves an extra step in the payment process which can involve redirecting them to an unfamiliar domain name. Not only can this result in delays, but it has also raised concerns about fraud, as it can be difficult for the consumer to differentiate between legitimate pop-up windows and fraudulent phishing sites.

Similarly, many customers have compained that they weren’t aware when registering with the system that they would need to enter the selected password on every use of the card, meaning that many did not note down the selected password for future use.

All this, however, is just a matter of customer education…”

Sagepay go onto advise that online sellers participating in 3D secure pre-warn their customers in some form of the procedure, thus educating in the process.

At some point I will retry 3D Secure payments once again with this clients site but only when the current economic climate has improved slightly as a repeat of a 60% decline in sales is not an option in the meantime.