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E-learning platforms seem to have exploded in recent years and are here to stay. At least 60% of internet users have partaken in online learning, and the industry has been experiencing rapid growth since the recent COVID-19 pandemic.
This eBook will dive into the eLearning industry's key opportunities and challenges and learn how new payment technology can help drive growth for online education platforms.
Now more than ever, customers are hooked on a shopping experience that's smooth and unhindered by time-consuming steps, no matter where they are or what they're buying.
Shoppers don't even want to think about how they'll pay for services or products at the checkout – the less friction there is, the more they'll buy.
Whether you are a school or university offering online courses, an EdTech company, or an e-learning marketplace platform, it is in your best interest to increase conversion rates and avoid churn by optimizing your students' payment experience by reducing the steps it takes to pay.
Now more than ever, customers are hooked on a shopping experience that's smooth and unhindered by time-consuming steps, no matter where they are or what they're buying.
Shoppers don't even want to think about how they'll pay for services or products at the checkout – the less friction there is, the more they'll buy.
Whether you are a school or university offering online courses, an EdTech company, or an e-learning marketplace platform, it is in your best interest to increase conversion rates and avoid churn by optimizing your students' payment experience by reducing the steps it takes to pay.
eLearning Payment Opportunities and Challenges
Users Expect the Best Payment Experience
The payment experience is often the least desirable step in any eCommerce experience. Long, arduous forms to fill and unnecessary steps will put budding users off and can contribute to high abandonment rates.
Alternative Payment Methods Are Crucial To Scale Globally
With online learning, students are no longer confined to the physical classroom. The opportunity to scale your user base and revenue is ripe for the taking.
Emerging economies, particularly in the APAC region, depend heavily on alternative and mobile payments to buy online. Large populations in the region tend to be unbanked, so offering traditional payments, such as credit cards, will not be suitable to take your platform global.
High Churn Rates
Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
A churn rate of 5% per month equals losing nearly half of your existing customers in a single year—meaning half of your revenue. Today, eLearning is growing fast, with many students joining each year.
However, a big problem has arisen. Studies show the average completion rate for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is only around 15%. Even a successful course will struggle to achieve more than 40% completion.
Being upfront about course requirements, content, duration, and payment plans are ways to help decrease your churn rate - as users will know what to expect and what they're signing up for.
A Rise in Fraud
Whenever there is a booming industry - fraudsters are often not far behind. Today, up to 43% of monthly e-commerce transactions involve fraud attempts, costing more than USD10 billion. And by 2023, eCommerce could lose up to USD 130 billion.
eLearning platforms are an attractive target for cybercriminals, either by supplying fake courses or trying to get hold of personal details from students and educators.
A Rise in Fraud
Whenever there is a booming industry - fraudsters are often not far behind. Today, up to 43% of monthly e-commerce transactions involve fraud attempts, costing more than USD10 billion. And by 2023, eCommerce could lose up to USD 130 billion.
Payment Links:
A payment link is when a request for online payment is created by a merchant and shared with customers to make an instant online payment. Usually shared via invoices and emails, payment links are a fast way to receive payments, which relevantly low risk of chargebacks.
Payment Reminders:
A payment reminder is when you contact your customer to tell them when and how a payment should be received. Letting customers know in advance ensures that the customer can make the funds available and improves the overall user experience.
Recurring Payments
Also known as subscription payments, recurring payments take the fee to use your platform weekly, monthly, or yearly. By implementing subscriptions into your payment infrastructure, you convenience customers, as they won't need to remember to pay you, and it helps you to predict your future revenue.
What is a Payment Aggregator?
A payment aggregator solution or platform allows businesses to integrate with multiple payment service providers, acquirers, and payment gateways simultaneously through a one-simple API key.
Working with a payment aggregator solution will eliminate most of the pain points plaguing edtech platforms experiencing rapid growth.
How Does Payment Aggregator Work?
A payment aggregator works by routing transactions through the best payment processor for that transaction.
Either by method with the highest acceptance rates, lowest processing costs, or by predetermined rules outlined by the merchant. Unlike traditional gateways, routing transactions mean achieving the highest conversion rates for the lowest costs.
How Does Payment Aggregator Relieve Challenges for E-Learning Platforms?
Makes Scaling Internationally Easier
Speed to market becomes easier with a payment integration later. You'll gain instant access to hundreds of international payment methods and more payment models, such as recurring payments.
You'll be able to reach more people, improve the customer experience, and get complete global coverage.
Decreases Reliance on Third-Party Processors
Payment integartion layers are unique in how they facilitate transactions. Smart payment routing ensures that each transaction is sent to the payment processor with the highest conversion rate and lowest administration fees.
If a processor is having a technical difficulty, the payment is simply sent to the next available processor.
Integrating a payment aggregator drastically decreases your reliance on third-party processors, so you won't ever need to worry about certain payment methods being unavailable to your customers.
Adds an Extra Layer of Security
When new technologies arise, fraudsters are usually not far behind.
Payment integartion layers help you double down on security to protect you and your customers from bad actors by tokenizing the transactions it facilitates.
Tokenization works like a placeholder for sensitive payment information. The card information is swapped out for a token when you make a purchase. That token is what enables secure transactions. The PAN is not transmitted during the transaction, making the payment process secure.
If a hacker breaks into one merchant's system, that data isn't linked to other credit cards, making it harder for criminals to commit fraud.
Makes Compliance Easier
PCI-DSS compliance can be tricky to understand and even harder to comply with. An added bonus of tokenizing your payments is that you'll be removing sensitive transaction details from your ecosystem, and it helps to eliminate third-party breaches.
This, in turn, helps you on your quest to abide by international payment legislation and regulations.
How Does the inai Platform Help Edtech Platforms To Scale?
Smart Payment Routing Lowers Transaction Costs
When expanding cross-border, managing multiple payment processors and gateways becomes costly. With inai, you can choose from three routing options to make the highest conversions for the lowest cost.
Static Routing
Route payments based on the payment method, country, BIN, and card brand to optimize for transaction success rates or fees.
Dynamic Routing
Dynamically route payments on a payment method and country basis on various factors, including success rates ( average and recent), transaction costs, payment method or payment service provider availability, etc.
Custom API Routing
Create configurable, and customized routing logic using API overrides to address your complex use cases.
Integrate 300+ Payment Methods in Less Than 60 Minutes
Firstly, inai is a no-coding payment aggregation platform, removing the development time from your engineers.
You'll find that many other orchestrators are API-first. You'll get access to many PSPs, but any customization required on top, such as adding alternative payment methods ( PMs) or running subscription logic, needs to be done yourself.
With inai, all of this is abstracted out, so no developer involvement is required once the initial integration and onboarding (which takes around 60 minutes) is complete. Once inai is integrated, you can gain access to over 300 payment processors and gateways.
Simple Dashboard Gives One Single Source of Truth
For merchants, many payment processors come with their dashboards, staying on top of CSV. Reconciliation quickly becomes a hassle.
With inai, you'll only have one dashboard to manage transaction tracking, payment method performance, and refund management for your entire platform. Your data becomes manageable, and decision-making becomes faster.
Offer a Great User Experience With Customisable Checkout
inai offers regionalization of your checkout, allowing you to accept payment methods that your customers want. So, for example, let's say in the US, you want to offer wallets such as Apple Pay, Paypal, and cards via Stripe but show Sofort in Germany via Adyen. This level of payment customization is possible through inai
You'll also have the option to customize your checkouts with payment links, SDK integration, or API-based integration. To ensure customers trust your checkout - you can customize the look and feel of your checkout to match your brand.
Facilitates Combined Business Models
Offering customers a range of ways to pay cement customer satisfaction and repeat business.
Whether you want to provide your customers with one-time payments, subscriptions, or multiple subscriptions with one-time components, you can choose what suits you. When you want to offer new or returning customers discounts and offers, you'll be able to manage this through inai effectively.
About Inai
inai is a payment orchestrator driven by a passion for technology and simplifying payment integration and processing for game developers. At inai, our goal is to help every company launch, manage and scale a global payment stack in minutes not weeks or months, and enable non-engineers in the company to take action on insights we deliver from their payment data.
Backed by leading venture capital firms
Inai is founded by repeat entrepreneurs who faced this problem first hand themselves. We have been backed by some of the most bankable investors in the world.
