Q: What is best practice now?
A: Payment is no longer a back-office function with heads-down caging operations opening mail, but a strategic lever of the customer experience. For publishers, there are three core best practices that meet the minimum of today’s savvy customer demands, namely, by offering choice with an eye on security and simplicity.
Readers expect frictionless checkout, multiple payment options, and confidence that their data is protected. Modern e-commerce platforms for publishing integrate payment processing directly into the subscription journey. This includes support for credit cards, direct debit, digital wallets, and region-specific methods like SEPA transfers. Flexibility is key by identifying the payment types your specific set of customers are expecting.
Customers may not understand all the tenets of PCI or the algorithms behind tokenisation, but they expect industry standard security measures across all entry points and data areas. The use of hosted capture pages and fraud prevention measures through trusted gateways should be integrated into your customer journeys.
When customers provide successful payment, they are expecting a simple process of being granted whatever they just purchased. This requires tight integration between payment gateways, subscription systems, and identity management layers. The days of waiting for overnight processes and incoherent error messages is long gone with customer just expecting things “to work”.
Q: How do you see it changing in the future?
A: Unsurprisingly, the future of payment in publishing is going to be largely dominated by automation, personalisation, and regulation.
There are already a few market leaders in payment recovery utilising vast amounts of historical data to predict churn and trigger proactive outreach. Expect these types of services to move directly into the domain of the payment gateways and become standard. Along with those services, expect an ever-increasing game of cat-and-mouse as AI is used by both bad actors and fraud detection systems — this game will increase costs passed on to organisations and ultimately customers.
Personalisation continues to be the promise of lifting publisher revenues. Payments will now play a role by dynamically offering different payment options to drive those revenues or by offering different journeys based on payment events.
Compliance, compliance, compliance. The EU will lead the global payment markets in tightening restrictions for organisations offering payment options. These regulations will necessitate additional technologies by publishers further increasing costs to customers and shrinking revenues. These regulations could come into direct conflict with payment gateway features setting up a clash of industries (eg. regulations restrict use of AI in payment contexts).
Three top tips
My top three tips are best summed up as… give the customer the best experience without the bells and whistles.
- Diversify payment options: Reduce reliance on traditional credit cards and expand into other types such as digital wallets and direct debit. This maximises reach without requiring cutting edge technology. Resist the urge to support all of the next generation payment options as this game ends in frustration and huge amounts of spent capital.
- Prioritise security without sacrificing (too much) UX: Implement payments with industry standard security measures while keeping the checkout straightforward. Users are willing to suffer through a few clicks, but they are never coming back if security is compromised.
- Integrate payments with core systems: Ensure the payment gateways are integrated with modern techniques to your downstream systems to reduce technical and operational overhead. It also puts you closer to future personalisation enhancements.
Philippe and the other contributors will take part in an ‘E-commerce Special – Q&A’ webinar on Tuesday, 27th January. Click here for more information and to register.
AdvantageCS delivers enterprise-class end-to-end subscription and order-to-cash management solutions for publishers worldwide. Our platform supports digital and print subscriptions, e-commerce, paywalls, customer identity management, and advanced analytics. With over 45 years of experience, we help content-driven organisations monetise, manage, and grow their businesses through flexible, integrated technology.
Email: contact@advantagecs.com
Web: www.advantagecs.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/philippe-van-mastrigt
This article was included in the E-commerce Special, published by InPublishing in December 2025. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.
