How can it drive your business growth?

Experience Cultivates Loyalty The importance of customer experience and its impact on a brand’s reputation and success is well-known. A positive experience leads to happy, recurring customers, increased sales, improved customer retention, and a thriving business. Research indicates that customers are willing to purchase more from brands that provide a great customer experience due to increased trust and loyalty. A similar concept applies to the gaming industry. The more flexible, accommodating, and seamless a gamer’s experience is, the more likely they are to become loyal to the brand and purchase future titles and in-game content. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze each step of the gamer’s journey to understand their pain points.   The Importance of Painless Payments One of the biggest pain points for gamers is the payment experience, with an average cart abandonment rate of over 60% in the gaming industry.  Improving this is vital to success. Merchants need to offer speed, security, and adaptability through various payment options to cater to player needs and drive recurring big-ticket purchases from both active and passive spenders. To deliver an engaging and immersive experience, merchants need to allow games to pay however and wherever they want. Continuously improving the checkout process as customer behavior evolves is essential, which is what we continually do through analytics, testing, and feedback via Xsolla Pay Station. Introducing: Pay with Points The Pay with Points solution provides the ability to accept payments of loyalty points1. This solution aims to create a flexible form of payment that allows players to make video game purchases by redeeming their loyalty rewards at checkout. Created in partnership with Mastercard, Pay with Points leverages Xsolla's payment capabilities and Mastercard's network-level expertise, global scale, and trusted connections to power a secure, accessible, and effortless payment experience.

How Pay with Points Can Change the Game

Pay with Points enables merchants to accept payments of loyalty points at checkout, creating an effortless experience for gamers. Additionally, it taps into the potential of loyalty programs to drive business growth with new benefits and advantages. Tackling Payment Industry Challenges Accepting online payments comes with obstacles and challenges that both gamers and developers face:

• High Drop-off: Lengthy payment experiences during checkout tend to turn customers away, which often results in a high purchase drop-off.
• Reaching non-paying gamers: With the popularity of free-to-play games, which rely on in-game purchases to generate revenue, there’s a struggle to engage with non-paying gamers and encourage them to make purchases. Additionally, gamers who make frequent purchases spend less, resulting in lower revenue.
• Low loyalty & customer retention: The needs of each player are unique, and a lack of inclusive payment methods can make them less likely to make recurring purchases or spend money on your game consistently. This impacts their loyalty to your brand.

It’s vital for developers to identify and find ways to overcome these challenges to deliver a faster and smoother payment process. In fact, 68 percent of consumers are more likely to prefer a brand if it offers quick and convenient digital payment options. With an understanding of the payments landscape and a goal to improve the gaming experience, Pay with Points was created to address these payment obstacles and provide developers with a simple, seamless, and secure payment method. Reaping the Benefits of Pay with Points Pay with Points will be seamlessly incorporated within Xsolla Pay Station, and allows gamers to use their loyalty points as a payment method at checkout when purchasing video game content. This gives merchants several advantages, including increased player conversion and game content purchases and enticing non-purchasing gamers to make a purchase. For your player gaming experience:

• Connect to loyalty programs and access billions of loyalty points globally. This is an opportunity to empower players everywhere to use Pay with Points as a payment method.
• With minimal maintenance and integration, it’s easy to add Pay with Points to your checkout experience through Xsolla API Rewards System.
• Introducing an additional payment method can increase player conversion, drive game content purchases, and even entice non-purchasing gamers to add items to their cart.  
• Make payments in gaming safe, accessible, and more secure while protecting the ever-growing digital ecosystem from threats.

For your business growth:

• Drive more reach for your business and grow your player base by creating a frictionless checkout experience that enables customers to redeem loyalty rewards.
• Encourage the redemption of loyalty points and increase the amount of purchases your players make by leveraging millions of reward and loyalty accounts around the world.
• Foster loyalty in your brand to reach more paying customers and offer a convenient checkout.
• Grow your revenue by expanding your payment methods and monetizing paying players’ loyalty points.

How it Works Adapting to player needs and improving their payment experience is crucial for gaming business success. Pay with Points streamlines the player journey by offering a variety of payment methods and enhancing transaction capabilities. Here’s how it works: Step 1: Your Store - Players navigate to your online store. Step 2: Checkout - Players finalize their cart and begin checkout. Step 3: Pay with Points - Players view their available reward balance and the value of their points towards their purchase. Step 4: Pay in real-time - Players redeem their rewards and use their points toward their total purchase. Step 5: Purchase complete - Redemption is successful, and the purchase is completed. This flexible and fast checkout process can drive more revenue, increase brand loyalty, and attract more gamers.

Turn Points into Purchases

Customer loyalty is a driving force for consumers not just to buy your products but also to support the success of your future releases. This is why loyalty programs are an effective way to activate passive purchases, reward repeat purchases, and nurture trust and loyalty in your brand. Are you ready to leverage the potential and expand your payment options? Thanks to this partnership between Mastercard and Xsolla, Pay with Points can be your solution. With the skills and expertise to enhance your ability to earn purchases and the tools and services to help set your game business up for success, our team can work with you to:

• Enable your customers to make purchases by redeeming their loyalty rewards.  
• Introduce an additional payment method that accepts loyalty rewards at checkout.
• Create a payment experience that entices non-purchasing gamers and boosts player retention.

Discover how Xsolla’s team of payments experts can help streamline your checkout experience by reaching out to us at business@xsolla.com. As the gaming industry continues to thrive, so does the potential for new opportunities. With more than 15 years of experience exclusively in gaming, a partnership with Xsolla can help you carve out a space for success as the industry grows and empower your business to become as innovative as your games. Ready to offer your players a new way to pay? Sign up with your Publisher Account to get started. Or, contact one of Xsolla’s payments experts to learn how you can start managing your business’ payments potential. 1 – From participating merchants and issuers