7.3 KiB
title, type, status, created, updated
| title | type | status | created | updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Payment Gateway Integration | product-brief | draft | 2025-11-04 | 2025-11-04 |
Product Brief: Payment Gateway Integration
Problem Statement
What problem exists? Our e-commerce platform currently lacks integrated payment processing capabilities, forcing customers to complete purchases through manual invoice processing. This creates significant friction in the buying process, with 45% of customers abandoning their carts during checkout when they discover they cannot pay immediately online.
Who experiences this problem?
- E-commerce customers attempting to purchase products online (15,000 unique monthly visitors)
- Sales team manually processing invoices and payment confirmations (handling 800-1,000 transactions/month)
- Finance team reconciling payments and updating accounting systems (20 hours/week manual work)
- Customer support handling payment-related inquiries (30% of all support tickets)
How often does it occur?
- Affects 100% of purchase transactions (approximately 1,000 transactions per month)
- Daily manual payment processing required for 30-40 orders
- Weekly reconciliation bottlenecks cause 2-3 day delays in order fulfillment
What's the business impact?
- Lost revenue: $2.4M annually from cart abandonment (45% abandonment rate on $5.3M annual pipeline)
- Operational costs: $120K/year in manual payment processing labor (sales + finance teams)
- Customer satisfaction: NPS score of 35 (below industry average of 50) with payment process cited as top complaint
- Competitive disadvantage: Losing deals to competitors with seamless online checkout
Target Users
Primary Users
Persona 1: Online Shopper (Sarah)
- Who they are: Tech-savvy consumers aged 25-45, making purchases $50-$500, expect modern e-commerce experience
- Key goals: Complete purchases quickly and securely, receive instant confirmation, avoid payment delays
- Pain points: Cannot pay online, must wait for invoice email, manual payment is time-consuming and feels outdated
- Frequency of use: 1-3 purchases per month, expect to checkout in under 2 minutes
Persona 2: Sales Representative (Mike)
- Who they are: Inside sales team member, processes 25-30 orders daily, manages customer relationships
- Key goals: Close deals faster, reduce administrative work, focus on selling not payment processing
- Pain points: Spends 2 hours daily creating invoices and following up on payments, manual errors cause delays
- Frequency of use: Multiple times daily, processes every transaction
Secondary Users
- Finance Team: Needs automated reconciliation and accurate transaction records, currently spends 20 hours/week on manual entry
- Customer Support: Handles payment status inquiries and issues, needs visibility into transaction status
- Business Leadership: Requires revenue reporting, conversion metrics, and fraud prevention
Proposed Solution
Solution Overview Integrate a best-in-class payment gateway (Stripe) to enable secure, real-time online payment processing with support for credit/debit cards, digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay), and one-click checkout for returning customers. The solution will automate payment processing, provide instant confirmation, and integrate with our existing CRM and accounting systems.
How it addresses the problem By enabling online payment processing, customers can complete purchases immediately without friction, eliminating the manual invoice workflow. Sales team can focus on selling instead of payment administration, finance team benefits from automated reconciliation, and the business captures revenue that was previously lost to abandonment.
Key capabilities
- Secure payment processing for credit/debit cards and digital wallets with PCI DSS compliance
- One-click checkout for returning customers with saved payment methods
- Real-time payment confirmation and automated receipt generation
- Integration with Salesforce CRM for order management and customer records
- Automated reconciliation with QuickBooks accounting system
- Fraud detection and prevention with 3D Secure 2.0
What makes this solution different? Unlike our current manual process, this provides instant payment processing (under 3 seconds) with zero manual intervention. Compared to basic payment gateways, we're choosing Stripe for its superior developer experience, comprehensive documentation, and proven reliability at scale.
Value Proposition
User Benefits
- Speed: Reduce checkout time from 24-48 hours (manual invoice) to under 60 seconds (online payment)
- Convenience: Pay with preferred method (card, Apple Pay, Google Pay) without leaving the site
- Security: PCI-compliant payment processing eliminates concerns about sharing card details
- Trust: Instant confirmation email and receipt provides peace of mind
- Returning customers: Save payment method for one-click future purchases
Business Benefits
- Revenue: Reduce cart abandonment from 45% to 15%, recovering $1.8M in annual revenue
- Operational efficiency: Eliminate 20 hours/week of manual payment processing, saving $100K annually
- Cash flow: Accelerate payment collection from 3-5 days to instant, improving cash flow by $200K
- Scalability: Support 10x growth without adding payment processing headcount
- Data insights: Real-time transaction analytics and conversion funnel visibility
- Customer satisfaction: Improve NPS score from 35 to 55+ with modern checkout experience
Competitive Advantages
- Achieve parity with competitors on basic online payment capability (table stakes)
- Differentiate with faster checkout experience (target: under 60 seconds vs industry average 2-3 minutes)
- Build foundation for future innovations: subscription billing, international expansion, marketplace features
- Create switching cost through saved payment methods and purchase history
Success Metrics
Launch Success Criteria
- Checkout conversion rate: 55% → 75% (reduce abandonment from 45% to 25%)
- Average checkout time: N/A (manual) → 45 seconds (90th percentile)
- Payment success rate: N/A → 98% (transactions completed successfully)
- Customer satisfaction: 35 NPS → 50+ NPS for checkout experience
- Payment processing uptime: Target 99.9% (maximum 45 minutes downtime per month)
Long-term Success Metrics
- Monthly transaction volume: 1,000 → 5,000 transactions per month within 6 months
- Revenue recovery: Recover $1.5M+ in previously abandoned cart revenue within 12 months
- Saved payment method adoption: 60% of customers save payment method for future use
- Operational cost reduction: Reduce manual payment processing costs by 80% ($100K annual savings)
- Average order value: Increase from $275 to $325 due to reduced friction
Leading Indicators
- First-week transaction volume exceeds 100 successful payments
- 70%+ of users complete checkout without contacting support
- Less than 5% of transactions require sales team intervention
- Payment-related support tickets decrease by 50% in first month
- 80%+ customer satisfaction rating on post-purchase survey