Make Online Payments Easier for eCommerce Customers.
Making your payment process easier for customers is crucial to increase conversion and sales. Your checkout page is the final stop for browsers visiting your site to become paying customers. This is where they share their credit card details with you and ultimately make a payment. It is important to have full control over the checkout process to make online payments easier and ensure that browsers convert into loyal customers. There are many electronic payment solutions out there. You need to make sure that you pick one that best fits your business model and your customers.
Provide Different Payment Methods
Surveys and research studies reveal that shoppers expect an eCommerce store to offer different payment options to make it easier for them to make online payments at checkout. It may help to look at your target audience to find out their preferred payment methods. By offering payment options preferred by your potential customers, you may be able to capture a majority of them. It all depends on your target market and the type of product or service you sell.
Related: Set up Your Business to Receive Payments, the Right Way!
Allow Easy Payment Options Without Requiring an Account
The payment making process should be seamless, without requiring customers to create an account with your eCommerce store. It is the convenience with which customers can make payments that will bring them to you. Forcing them to create an account can adversely affect their interest in going ahead with the purchase and they may just abandon their cart.
According to a usability study conducted by Smashing Magazine, the prime roadblock to creating a user account is the expected and unwanted potential flood of promotional emails. Some customers even start comparing the ease with which they are able to make payment at a brick and mortar store, without having to create an account with them. Besides, this takes time and prolongs the payment process.
Make life easier for potential customers by making the online payments process seamless for them.
Be Consistent Throughout Your eCommerce Store
You may want to keep everything as consistent as possible across all channels from a branding perspective. It may help to use the same design, fonts, and colors on your checkout page as on your entire website. This will help raise brand recognition for your business. Remember, even shoppers are skeptical about sharing their account details on a checkout page that has a different look and feel from the site they were shopping on. Make sure that your credit card payment processor has tools that let you accomplish this easily.
Don’t Send Customers Away to Your Competitors
Driving traffic to your site is no easy task. You have worked hard to draw people, so why send them away to other sites to make an easier payment? Re-directing them to another payment gateway could create apprehension in their minds that they are giving money to a different business. You will want your customers to remember your business name, so make it easier for them to make payment on your page, instead of diverting to another payment platform. The payment platform you choose must be able to white label their payment receiving pages.
Related: More Payment Options Mean More Sales for eCommerce Stores
Make It Easy to Fix Errors
Often an error message appears on top of the checkout page. When a customer submits a checkout form with an error, they often do not realize that they need to scroll up to see what went wrong. The best approach is to ensure that the error message appears clearly and focuses attention in the field where it has occurred. This will make it easier for customers to spot errors and fix them.
Additionally, you may want to enhance the user experience by making it easier to save the submitted information, ensuring the user does not need to input all the details again if an error has occurred. There is nothing more annoying for a customer than having to resubmit all the details only because they made one silly mistake.
Only Ask for Important Information
Customers don’t want to share too many personal details, so you want to limit the amount of information requested from them! Sure you want to try to find out more about their likes and dislikes in order to promote better to them, but do that in a follow up email after the checkout process.
No one is interested to fill out a form requiring too much information unrelated to a purchase! By doing so, you are only adding hurdles to purchase and increasing chances of killing a conversion.
Make online payments easier, faster and more secure and you will be sure the convert more browsers into loyal customers and directly affect your bottom line.
Contact Us for more information on Credit Card Processing, or eChecks and ACH Transactions. Or take us up on our FREE Merchant Account Analysis offer. We’ll analyze your merchant account rates and let you know how to Save! If you are ready, you may be able to Switch and Save!
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