The meteoric rise of the smartphones and tablets have changed the face of e-commerce and m-commerce. Did you know that one out of every three shoppers use a mobile device as part of their purchasing process? Mobile based transactions have grown at an incredible 118 percent per year for the last five years!

Younger generations are more likely than anyone to use mobile checkout options. Surprisingly, 88.8 percent of retailers do not offer mobile payment options to their shoppers. The result? 75 percent of smartphone users abandon sites that are not mobile optimized. This is why the factors that drive cart abandonment are intensified for mobile.

So, how about adding a mobile payment solution to your shopping cart?

After extensive research, Minkasu has put together a list of five critical considerations before choosing your mobile payments solution.

User experience drives revenue

Eliminating redundant steps and reducing friction in the checkout flow is a critical and proven way of reducing abandonment, improving conversions, and increasing revenue. Why have a payment option or get a new one if it wouldn’t improve your top line and bottom line?

Even with sophisticated and optimized checkout flows, the average rate of online shopping cart abandonment is 68.53 percent. Imagine 2 out of every 3 customers that put items into your shopping cart fail to complete the purchase! Forgotten passwords, convoluted checkout processes and new user account creation are the top reasons.

Payment solutions that don’t need users to enter their usernames, passwords or payment information tend to score better over the traditional means of making payments.

Payment solutions should work everywhere

Your payment solution should work across channels and operating systems. It shouldn’t matter if your customer is on a tablet, a desktop or a mobile phone. It also shouldn’t matter if he is paying for something in a physical store. It should offer a consistent and streamlined checkout for online, mobile web, mobile apps and physical stores.

It shouldn’t matter if a user has an iPhone or an Android Phone. To use Apple Pay, you need an iPhone. To use Android Pay, you must have an Android Phone. A great multi-channel payment solution should work across all channels, operating systems and devices.

The Pymnts blog aptly summarizes this point: The “winner” of mobile wallet wars has to work across operating systems, shopping channels, browsers and technology platforms.

Appeal to millennials

Mobile checkout has a huge appeal with the millennial shoppers. Majority of millennial shoppers, who’ve grown up in the age of smartphones, like to research on mobile devices before making a purchase.

Interestingly, eighty million millennials in America have an annual buying power of $200 billion. You can’t afford to discount this demographic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2020, millennials will comprise 46% of United States workforce.

Don’t compromise on security

Even the largest and most trusted companies that have spent millions of dollars on security have fallen victim to data breaches. Sensitive financial information has been compromised. Target, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus, Michaels are just some of them.

Every payment solution out there claims to be secure, but you should always pay attention to the details. Does your payment solution store the credit card numbers? Does your payment solution still rely on outdated authentication methods such as usernames and passwords, prone to phishing? Or does it make use of advanced verification technologies like biometrics that are both convenient and secure?

Your payment solution should take the merchants out of the payment path. The card details should not be shared with the merchants. In fact, the most secure solution is the one that does not store your customers’ credit card numbers anywhere or share it with merchants.

Smartphones now have additional capabilities that can potentially add new biometric security layers. Sophisticated technologies like biometrics, tokenization and ID verification eliminate the potential threat of identity theft and fraud.

Quick and easy implementation is key

Your payment solution should be quick and easy to implement. Software solutions that do not change your existing payment infrastructure are easier and cheaper to implement than some of the intrusive and costly hardware ones.

So now that we’ve listed the five most important parameters, how do your existing payment solutions (or for that matter, any new ones, that you might be considering) stack up? The payment solution you choose should ease the checkout process for your customers instead of complicating it.

At Minkasu, we feel strongly about improving conversions and increasing revenue through (1) intuitive user experience, (2) taking a multi-channel approach, (3) appealing to millennials, (4) offering superior security and (5) quick implementation. After all, we’re a company that keeps you, the merchant, at the heart of all our development efforts.

Minkasu offers a simple, smart and secure way of accepting mobile payments. We believe smartphone checkout is not only the future, but also the present.

For more information, watch our video.