作者：Philip Drive

想象你花了一个小时在商店里仔细研究各种商品，衡量它们的优势和劣势以及真正的优点。最后你做出了购买决定，尽管你可能还带有疑惑，但还是走向了收银台。

在收银台前会有人要求你坐下填写一大堆资料，并选择用户名和密码。而当你完成这些内容将银行卡递交给对方准备结账时，他却可能告诉你本店不接受美国运通卡。

因为那时候你身上就只有这张卡能付钱，所以你便不得不生气且失望地留下商品离开了。

在网上，这种情况每天都在上演着。在线购物车的放弃率高达50%，电子游戏中的内部购买亦是如此。限制付费选择数量并增加用户付费步骤将带来许多不必要的摩擦。这将导致用户选择放弃购买，从而大大降低了游戏的转换率并提高用户的不满意度。现在请问问你自己，如果你是用户，你是否会再次购买，还是会选择彻底离开游戏？

据估计，在英国11%的在线付费是使用所谓的“选择性付费（AP）”，如手机支付，银行转账，直接借记，eWallets以及其它非信用卡/借记卡的支付方式。全球的AP占总交易价值的22%。

在这些新的AP中，eWallets的增长速度是最快的，并且WorldPay也预测在2015年前它们将占据所有AP的50%。所以我们便能理解，现在大多数玩家正在扩展自己的eWallets版本，如Visa的V.me以及MaterCard的MasterPass。然而有许多国家已经使用eWallets很多年了，它们知道这些市场中发生了什么，并且能够帮助你更好地预测未来的种种可能性。

eWallets(from cnet)

实际上，如今的全球付费市场变得更加分裂且区域化，从而导致你的游戏和游戏内部交易在进入全新区域时变得更加复杂且昂贵。而这也屡次证明了用户在未看到自己可用的付费选择后便会放弃购买。也就是如果他们不得不使用外国货币，外国银行或自己不熟悉的支付方式，他们便会决定退出。

幸运的是，比起标准的电子商务，电子游戏市场具有许多特殊且相关联的付费方式，且被广泛地用于这个产业中。随着来自快速发展的免费游戏的微交易模式被带进更多游戏中，现在的我们拥有更多付费选择了。

当然了，提供给用户更多付费选择对于开发者来说也是一把双刃剑。尽管用户能够拥有更多选择，但是你却不得不纠结于整合，定价以及是否会让用户感到困惑等问题。根据平台去整合这些方法总是很困难，并且需要你花费大量时间进行必要的整合。你可能需要使用第三方服务或向别人寻求意见。如果你是面向一个特殊平台进行开发，如iOS，你便会直接与该特殊市场所定制的付费方式捆绑在一起。

以下是来自Casual Connect Europe Conference 2013的视频，即介绍了各种手机市场，其付费率以及关于税收和法律责任的利弊。

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU8vt6CrTy0

不同方法的定价也有很大的差别，就像信用卡交易的成本只占3%至4%，而SMS付费则占25%至30%。这就要求你必须去理解用户并根据你的能力去决定提供给他们怎样的付费选择。对于包含微交易机制的手机游戏（不足1美元），用户也许不能使用信用卡等方式，这时候提供SMS计费便更有意义。但是对于商店中所出售的全价商品便不是如此了。尽管两者间的成本%是相同的，但是商店用户更希望能够以廉价的方式进行支付，如此你便可以在不破坏用户满足度的前提下获得利润了。

如今许多游戏都在通过提供更廉价的付费选择而带给玩家更多价值，如此不仅能够挽留住更多用户，还能获得更大的利润。也有一些游戏主动划分出不同付费类型，并要求玩家选择其中的某种类型，但同时也留下了许多其它的类型。

当提到用户满足度时，并不是你提供给用户更多选择，你便能够看到想看到的结果。就像在购物车流程和付费页面中，少即意味着更好。在购买过程中，任何决定的购买阶段总是最脆弱的。用户并不喜欢被混淆或不确定自己下一步该做些什么，而如果你提供过多付费选择，并且未对付费类型进行解释或让玩家不知道如何去使用，你便创造了一个不必要的摩擦，最终便会造就较低的转换率。人们总是希望付费方式能够简单些。

对于你付费过程中的任何改变，包括添加新的付费方式，我会建议你使用简单的A/B测试去衡量影响。你也采取一些更复杂的方式，甚至利用各种类型的测试（如果你拥有相关知识的话），但是简单地将用户划分为50/50或呈现一种全新的付费方法将帮助你更清楚地瞄准各种利益。你可以根据所包含的成本去撤回改变或为其做出反驳。

如果你正在运行测试，请确保你拥有足够的数据去帮助自己做出最明智的选择。只花一个小时或一天去运行测试远远不够。你至少需要花数周时间去运行测试，除非你的流量数据很多。在此你的目标便是获得一些有影响的理念。

当前的市场

就像我之前所提到的，付费选择多种多样，特别是在全球范围内，所以你需要根据目标市场去选择最合适的类型。如果你的用户中99%是来自北美地区，你便不能使用Yandex（游戏邦注：俄罗斯重要网络服务门户之一），直到你面向俄罗斯实施产品本土化策略，或获得大量的俄罗斯用户时。这便说明了在某些情况下，你未能拥有更多外国用户是因为你并未使用他们所喜欢的付费方式。

关于这种情况的一大典例便是法国的信用卡使用。表面上看来，信用卡是当地最主要的付费类型，但是当你真正深入这个国家时会发现，30%的市场被Carte Bleue卡（这是法国当地的一种借记卡）所占领。如果你想要提供Carte Bleue支付方式，你就需要与法国实体公司或付费服务提供者合作。

另外一个例子便是银行转账，并且同样的过程（在线或离线）在不同国家中也是不同的。所以在巴西最受欢迎的是Boleto Bancarios，而在德国则是Sofort.

这些当地的支付功能也具有其本身的成本或风险，如德国的ELV便具有较大的欺诈风险。尽管你能够通过避免使用ELV而降低欺诈风险，但却会因此损失大量用户，因为在德国的在线交易中，ELV的使用率占30%。

这些当地的支付功能将对你的业务带来很大的影响。

在考虑付费选择时，你需要确保使用的是电子游戏导向的付费类型并与合适的付费服务提供者进行合作。为此你需要明确目标用户，以及他们对于付费类型的影响。如果你的目标用户非常年轻，就像宠物管理游戏那样，那么预付卡和现金便是最佳选择。但是如果你创造的是一款列车模拟游戏，即拥有更年长的目标用户，那么你便可以选择信用卡或银行转账形式。

未来的付费模式

世界各地的付费模式正在趋于多样化，但这主要是因为现在出现了更多市场并且它们也都具有自己的要求。然而随着一些巨头们正在挺近全新领域，所以有可能eWallets将成为未来主要的付费选择。不过这也只是人们的猜测，并且仍存在众多可供选择的系统。

通常情况下，任何特定领域的付费方式都是市场成熟度以及用户特定趋势的产物。就像在俄罗斯人们都非常习惯于现金支付，所以他们会选择使用现金去结账或购买商品，但是现在这种情况开始发生了改变。随着经济的发展，人们所担忧的安全问题和市场渗透率已经得到了解决，所以信用卡再次盛行起来。中国拥有更多借记卡，信用卡和现金仍然被广泛使用着，而随着经济的发展，这里也出现了更多选择，并吸引着更多外商进入该市场。

也许关于市场最大的未知变化是源自手机领域，即手机运营商和银行间的关系变得更加模糊，像NFC（进场通讯）以及无接触式付款方式等全新付款选择也得到了广泛的使用。像Zong这样的公司便在在线领域推动着这一市场的发展，即用微交易取代了早前的SMS付费方式，不过还有一些付费提供者通过再次使用这一技术，并将其与eWallets结合在一起而创造了全新的内容。

留心其它选择：

作为中国最受欢迎的支付方式，支付宝共拥有7亿多注册用户，所以我觉得他们的野心应该不只是待在中国。

瑞典的支付方式Klarna让用户可以在收到商品后付钱，而这却给商人们造成了很大的财务风险。现在这种方式只出现在7个国家，并且主要是在北欧国家，不过他们也在迅速扩展着。且如今的他们也将实现瞄准了美国市场。

最后我想说的是，付费方式非常复杂，除非你们团队拥有相关专家，否则你最好与付费提供者合作，从而找到最合适的付费选择。

了解市场，听取玩家的看法并要求提供者给予你所需要的信息都需要你付出一定的代价。但是你却不能因此感到害怕或不敢做出尝试，同时你还需要为此进行反复测试。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Localizing Payment Options and Reducing Friction for Video Games

by Philip Drive

Imagine you have spent an hour carefully considering products in a store, weighing up the pro’s and cons and veritable merits of the various goods. You have come to a purchase decision, although you still have some doubts but head to the checkout anyway.

At the checkout you are forced to sit down and fill out lengthy form about who you are and pick passwords and usernames. Once completed you hand over your card to pay only to be told that the store does not accept American Express.

As you have no other way of paying at the time you are forced to leave the store and abandon your purchase feeling angry and disappointed.

This happens every day online. The abandonment rate for online shopping carts can be 50% and the same is true of in-game purchases for video games. By limiting the number of payment options and increasing the steps a user has to take to pay you are increasing unnecessary friction. This will lead to users dropping out of making purchases, lowering your conversions and increasing player dissatisfaction. Now ask yourself, if you were the user, would you purchase again and even worse, would you stop playing?

If you are going to operate worldwide you need to think about payments on a global scale and that means understanding local markets. For many English speaking territories this can be daunting having been used to a fairly static payments market where it is very easy to get by with Visa, Master and of late PayPal. However even here things are changing rapidly, with the market beginning to demand more frictionless options for smaller micro-transactions and more convenience from their payments.

In the UK it is estimated that 11% of all online payments are now what the industry terms “Alternative Payments” i.e. Mobile, Bank Transfer, Direct Debit, eWallets and other non-credit/debit card based payments. Globally AP account for 22% of total transactions by value.

Of these new AP eWallets are seeing the most growth with WorldPay predicting that they will account for nearly 50% of all AP by 2015. Understandably the major players are now rolling out their own versions of eWallets such as Visa’s V.me and MasterCard’s MasterPass. However many countries have been using eWallets for several years already and understanding what has happened in these markets will help you gauge the future possibilities in others.

In truth the global payments market is exceptionally fragmented and localized which makes pushing your games and their purchase or in-game commerce into new regions complicated and possibly expensive. But it has been proven time and again that customers will abandon purchases if they don’t see their preferred payment option. On top of this many will also abandon if they have to complete a transaction in a currency foreign to them or with a foreign bank or other payments mechanic.

Just to compound the issue the video games market also has a number of specific or closely associated payment methods and aggregators more widely used in this industry than say standard ecommerce. With the introduction of micro transactions to games mainly from the burgeoning F2P sector we now have more options for payments than ever before.

At the bottom of this article you will find a good infographic (though not video game specific) that goes some way to so show the broad range of options available.

Of course offering users more choice of payments comes as a kind of double edged sword to the developer. While users have more options, you face headaches over integrations, pricing and possibly user confusion. Depending on your platform integrating with some of these methods can be difficult and cost you man hours in building out the necessary integration. You may have to use third parties or bounce off others all of which complicates matters. If you are developing for a specific platform, i.e. iOS then you are tied directly to whatever the payouts of that particular market place might be.

Below is a video from the Casual Connect Europe Conference 2013 that has a particularly good section on the various mobile marketplaces, their payout rates and pros and cons as regards tax and legal liabilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU8vt6CrTy0

Pricing also varies widely between methods and while you could typically see low costs of around 3-4% for credit card transactions something like SMS payments can be anywhere between 25-30%. This requires that you understand your user and make fundamental decisions about what you should and can afford to offer them. For a mobile game that involves micro transactions, of less than $1, where users may not have access to credit cards etc it makes sense to offer SMS billing. However for a full price product available on a store it would not. Though the % in costs would be no different between the two, store users are more likely to be happy to pay with the less expensive methods allowing you to retain margin without effecting customer satisfaction.

Many games are now incentivizing their payment methods by actively offering players greater value for money from less expensive payment types as a way to pass on the saving to users and retain greater margins. Others hide or proactively sort their payment types to sway users into choosing one over another while still retaining a large roster of options.

On the subject of customer satisfaction, while it may seem that the more options you offer the user the better it is not always translated through to the results you see. The problem being that when it comes to cart flows and payment pages, less is most definitely more. The purchase phase of any decision is always the most fragile step in the buying process. Users do not want or appreciate being confused or unsure as to what to do next and by offering too many payment options, not making payment types self-explanatory or difficult to use you are creating unnecessary friction, which will undoubtedly be represented by lower conversion rates. People want simplicity from their payments.

For any changes to your payment process including adding new payment methods I would advise that you run a simple A/B test to measure the impact. You can go more complex and even look at multi-variant testing if you have the knowledge but even simply splitting users 50/50 to hide or show a new payment method will give you good insight into any benefits. You can then either dismiss the change or perhaps weigh it up against any costs involved.

If you are going to run testing though please do ensure you have enough data to make an informed decision. Simply running a test for an hour or even a day is not enough. Ideally you need to run tests for a number of weeks, unless your traffic numbers are huge but even then you want to account for days of the week or in game sales plus other external factors like national events or competitor advertising. The goal is to get a rounded idea of impact.

The Current Market.

As mentioned earlier payment options are exceptionally diverse, especially when working at a global level and deciding on which types to adopt will largely depend on what markets are important to you. If you users are 99% North American there is no point adopting Yandex until you localize your product for Russia or are getting significant Russia users. That said in some cases it may not be as clear cut and could be a case of “chicken and egg” so you don’t see as many foreign users because you don’t have their favored payment method. Below is a snapshot of the current payments world for some main and upcoming countries.

As you can see in these 12 countries there is already a major variance in the options and their uptake and this still does not take into account the regional versions of these payment types.

A good example of this is credit cards in France. On the surface credit cards seem to be the most predominant type of payment but once you work in the country you realize that 30% of the market is the Carte Bleue card which is a local card type specific to France (although affiliated with Visa). If you offer Carte Bleue, you will need a French entity or employ a payment service provider.

Another example is bank transfers, whilst essentially the same process (though can be online or offline) each country can have its own variation. So in Brazil the most popular would be Boleto Bancarios, whereas in Germany it is Sofort (Sofortüberweisung).

These local variations can also have their own costs or risks such as ELV in Germany which requires additional levels of fraud screening as the standard setup has few real checks in place. Whilst you may lower your fraud risk by not providing ELV you then cut out a large section of your users given that ELV accounts for nearly 30% of all online transactions in Germany.

These local variations can have significant impact on your business.

At the bottom of this article I will post some links to country guides by the major players in this space.

When considering payment options you need to make sure you are looking at and working with specifically video games orientated payment types and payment providers. On top of this you need to understand your own demographic and how this will also impact payment types. If your game has a very young demographic like a pet management game then its likely prepaid cards and cash options will be highly valuable to your business. However if you have created a train simulator with a much older demographic they may want credit cards and bank transfers.

The Payments of Tomorrow?

The world of payments is seemingly getting more diverse but this is mainly due to the fact that more markets are now accessible and have their own requirements. However the big players are now pushing into new areas and it’s likely that eWallets will become the payment method of choice for online in the future. How long they will hold sway though is anyone’s guess and there are plenty of other systems out there to choose from.

The payment methods in any given region are normally a product of the maturity of the market and the specific tendencies of users. Russia was predominantly a cash based society with many people choosing to pay cash at ATM style terminals for bills and products, but this is changing. Credit cards are becoming popular again as old security fears and market penetration is pushed aside by an expanding economy. China has far more debit cards that credit and cash on delivery is still widely used but again as the economy grows more options are taking over as operators work at a larger scale and foreign businesses look to break into the market.

Perhaps the biggest unknowable change to the market will come from the mobile sector as the line between mobile phone operators and banks become blurred and innovations like NFC and contactless payments become widely used. Companies like Zong are driving this market in the online space replacing older SMS style payments for micro transactions but the technology is being used by other payment providers and mixed with eWallets to create something between the two.

Other options to look out for are:

Alipay the favored PM in China, with over 700 million registered accounts I think it’s highly unlikely their ambitions remain with one country.

Klarna a Swedish payment method that allows users to pay after receiving the goods but takes on all financial risk for the merchant. Currently only in 7 countries and mainly still Nordic based they are expending rapidly and venture backed by the same people that though Google might be a pretty neat idea. They currently have their sights set on the US market (I once very nearly got a job there myself, but that’s a story for another day).

In closing, payments are complex and unless you have in house expertise for the majority of cases its best to work with payment providers and aggregators to get the required options in a package.

Understand your markets, listen to your players and push your provider to give you the coverage you need at a reasonable cost to your business. Don’t be afraid to mix and match and make sure you test, test, test. (source:gamasutra)