To remain competitive in the online marketplace, businesses need to provide a secure and seamless payment experience on web and mobile. Security is paramount; however, the technologies used to protect consumers’ data can add delays at checkout and impact the overall payment experience -- especially for purchases made from remote locations.
As a global payments leader, delivering the best payments experience without compromising security is essential. To that end, Braintree is updating its payment platform with regional cloud support, which will bring merchants closer to their customers regardless of their location and significantly reduce checkout times.
A brief primer on payments security through tokenization
One of the most important safeguards Braintree provides is tokenization, which allows merchants to charge customers without ever handling raw card information. For merchants that don't want that extra security burden, Braintree can collect the sensitive credit card data directly from the buyer on the merchant's website or app and return a random alphanumeric token. The merchant can then use the token to charge the customer. Since a token has no meaning outside the Braintree platform, the consumer’s privacy stays protected and the merchant helps reduce the risk of a data breach while remaining PCI compliant.
Increase conversion and enhance customer satisfaction
Tokens are great from a security and compliance point of view. But because tokenization requires direct communication with Braintree’s servers, customers may experience increased latency when in remote locations.
To address this issue, Braintree has deployed a regional cloud solution that minimizes the distance between merchants, buyers, and the Braintree servers. Currently, cloud support is available in the US and in Australia with additional regions to follow. This enhancement will help to expedite checkout and improve the customer payment experience.
Our preliminary tests show that customers in Australia see an average increase of speed at checkout of about 2.5 seconds.1 This is significant considering Google claims that in retail, a one-second delay in mobile load times can impact mobile conversions by up to 20%.2
Cloud support is also combined with a new Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, which minimizes possible communication failure rates. Google recently revealed that if people have a negative experience on mobile, they’re 62% less likely to purchase from a merchant in the future.3 So, we are equally excited to bring this new CDN service live to drive customer satisfaction even further.
No re-integration needed
We’ve designed our cloud capabilities to be widely distributed and horizontally scalable. Most importantly, merchants will be able to take advantage of these new capabilities without any changes to their integration -- all they have to do is upgrade to the latest version of our client SDK and to start checking out customers faster.
If you’re interested in learning more about our global cloud functionality, please reach out at accounts@braintreepayments.com. We’d love to chat about it.
Braintree compared, in an infrastructure production environment - 10 times during 1 minute, the average time for requests made to the Braintree data center and the average time for requests made to its local cloud service. ↩
SOURCE: Google/SOASTA, “The State of Online Retail Performance,” April 2017 ↩
SOURCE: Google/Purchased, U.S., “How Brand Experiences Inspire Consumer Action,” n=2010 U.S. smartphone owners 18+, brand experiences=17,726, April 2017. ↩