Making it as simple and pain-free as possible for your customers to pay when they shop on your website is crucial for boosting sales for your eCommerce business. This is why your payment gateway is so important. It is where your customers enter their payment information and give you their money, allowing you to grow your business successfully.
If you make it complicated and painful for your customers, they are not going to be your customers for very long – they are going to go elsewhere. Here, we look at some tips to make it as smooth and easy as possible, for all involved.
Offer as many payment methods as possible
Clients demand much more than debit or credit card payments. PayPal, Stripe, and other forms of payment are now presumed. As much as 40% of people believe that having only one method of payment from which to choose appears amateurish and even questionable and that they would relinquish their purchases and look elsewhere if their favored method of payment was not available. This is why it is essential to offer a range of options – this company offer easy ecommerce payment processing.
Offering multiple payment methods is also important to prevent the soft decline – which can be resolved but may dissuade a customer from completing the purchase – and hard decline – a decline that usually cannot be resolved by the customer on the spot, effectively ending the chance of conversion – of payments. As such, a choice of payment options can decrease the chances of soft and hard decline whilst increasing the likelihood of customers completing transactions on your site.
Don’t make them create accounts to make a purchase
Pretty much everything we do on the internet now requires us to create an account and register. While this does have some have advantages for collecting data about your customers, it is important to remember that customers already have a ton of usernames and passwords to remember. If they are just intending to make a one-off purchase, having to go through the rigmarole of creating an account might be enough for them to click away. Give them the option of creating an account OR purchasing as a guest.
Make sure your site is safe and secure
When it comes to personal data, you should always go out of your way to demonstrate the security measures you have in place. Many customers have backed out of a purchase because they are concerned about security issues. You will need a SSL certificate for your website to provide a secure connection and encrypt credit card information, and if you do business in the European Union, you will need to be GDPR compliant.
Get rid of or minimize the distractions
Your checkout page is the final step in the sales funnel. With our attention spans shorter than ever, you do not want anything to draw attention away from them from completing the checkout process, such as advertisements. The last thing you want to do is bring them all this way only to have them click away to a viable rival. Your main goal here is to get people to make the final payment, so remove everything else, including the navigation bar at the top, and only ask for vital information.
If you follow the tips above, you will not only drive revenue and reduce shopping cart abandonment, but you will also create a smooth experience that people will return to.
