Shopping is now going the way of the web. Consumers are now increasingly inclined to shop online. Well, why wouldn't they be? Try naming an item that comes to your mind, and it most likely is available online. Besides having the flexibility of browsing through each page of the store at your own pace, then compare products and prices, you can also conveniently make payments in the comfort of your home.

Online shopping is no longer limited to smaller everyday items like clothing, gadgets or household goods, but could also include larger and more luxurious items like property. Ananda Development is a leading property developer here in Thailand with condominium projects located in prime locations across Bangkok. The company takes a leading stance on providing a streamlined experience by incorporating online payment acceptance into its online booking system.

Pre-sales are a big deal for property

Pre-sales in residential development is a common way projects kick-off. On the launch date, investors can book the property of their choice directly from our website. Events like these will often draw a lot of traffic, and it is important for us to ensure that we have systems ready to handle transactions during the peak periods. Pre-sales are definitely not the time for system crashes, payment system failures or any kind of error. Phonganan Sookkasem (Senior VP Corporate Marketing)

“We want to optimize the online booking experience for our customers, in particular, the payments process. It's not just about our customers being able to make payments, but it is allowing them to do it conveniently and securely. For a business like ours, the requirement is that the payment processor can scale and support us during our peak transaction periods. We work against the clock and do not want to lose sales because of something that can be prevented in the first place.”

“Ananda Development partnered with Omise back in 2017, and since then, have worked together through multiple pre-sales events. With Omise, we are able to provide our customers with the kind of experience we had in mind. Recently, we launched Ideo Rama9 – Asoke, and were able to close all sales within 15 minutes without any service interruption.

Common issues property developers face during online bookings

Most of the time it's that our operations team is unable to track down the customers' reservation status. What I mean is that, once the customer reaches checkout, they get redirected to a third party operated payments page where they enter their details to complete payments. This is our pain point. We cannot tell whether the payment has been completed, whether the buyer is experiencing any difficulty, or if they decided to leave the site. Not being able to identify the actual cause of customer drop-offs is a loss to the business.

Payments are the bottleneck of the entire customer journey. The moment that the pre-sales start traffic flows in, and the majority are headed to the same destination which is to check out. From our end, we can ensure that our website can handle the traffic and not give up midway. It is important that the payment gateway we partner with is capable to handle the same. We cannot accept downtimes or slow processing speed which can lead to a bottleneck.

How Omise helps

“Omise is an API-first payments provider. Integrating with Omise, we could seamlessly and securely accept payment online. Omise provides various payment APIs, this allowed us to integrate payment functionalities into our existing workflow. Our operations team could still work with the same dashboard and have access to the payment information they required. This saves us time and hassle of having to train the team all over again.”

“With Omise, we are able to see the payment status of each of our customers in real-time. We're particularly impressed with Omise's Charge API. Not only does it keeps us informed of the charges' status but also lets us know what type of error our customers are facing; allowing our support team to reach out with the right solution.”

The table above shows the possible errors that may cause a charge to be unsuccessful — the card has reached its credit limit or the cardholder has entered the wrong OTP, for example. Knowing the cause of a failed charge allows the team to contact the cardholder to help rectify the situation right away. In cases where the customer has decided to leave the site, the team can also release the reserved room to other prospective buyers.

Not being able to identify the reservation status is a drawback. It means we cannot offer help when customers need it, nor can we release abandoned room reservations to others in a timely manner. Mr. Phonganan said.

“Partnering with Omise made it possible for us to cater to the lifestyle of millennials which prefer speed and convenience. On top of that, we were able to streamline the complicated payment processes without compromising security.”

Source: Techsauce