Business owners who desire to increase their conversion and sales must work on easing the payment process for their customers. Frustrating your payment process for your patrons is the last thing you would want to do; whether it’s over web-chat, online, or over the phone.
From staying competitive in the market and growing a loyal customer base to increasing sales, it’s very crucial to offer the best payment experience for your customers because of the plethora of positive, wide-reaching implications that are attached to running a smooth payments operation.
And, you risk losing both sales and customers when you refuse to beef up the payment experience of your customers as they can decide to quit patronizing you and move to one of your competitors.
Given that any business with ambitious growth plans must effectuate an effective payments strategy, it’s no surprise that the success or failure of a business is often determined by a cogent factor: payments and cash flow management.
And, this is simply because payment is the heart and soul of all businesses. So, how do you go about improving the payment experience of your customers? There are actually tons of ideas that can help you reduce obstacles to purchasing and enhance payment processes and here are some of them;
Provide As Many Payment Options As Possible
The chances are high that you’ll keep losing sales when the preferred option of mobile payment of your customer isn’t supported by your business.
Customers are often presented with a wide range of payment options, especially when it comes to e-commerce and there are several reasons why customers tend to be selective about their preferred payment option. While some don’t want to keep signing in on several websites, some are very particular about security and privacy.
Thus, it’s crucial that you ensure that there are several payment options available on your website if you desire to enjoy more sales. And, Stripe, Venmo, Samsung Pay, Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, Debit Cards, Credit Cards, and a host of other online payment platforms are some of the most important payment options that should be made available on your website.
Don't Enforce Creating Of Accounts Before Payment
Most businesses tend to scare and chase their customers away when they mandate their customers to create an account before they can complete their payment process.
This is an act that can reduce the trust people have in your brand. Yes, you can collect information and even promote sales when you encourage your customers to create an account but this shouldn’t be forcibly enforced.
Do well to make purchases as easy as possible for your customers and one of the things that you can do to encourage this is to allow guest checkout.
Most customers do not like the burden of receiving several marketing emails from time to time and the need to remember username and password can also be exhausting for some. And, you should note that if a customer is yet to have an experience with your brand, he or she may not be interested in creating an account on your e-commerce site.
Make The Checkout Design Seamless
Do you know that your conversion rates are hugely impacted by your checkout design? Well, they surely are.
And, this points to why you must ensure that your checkout design isn’t complicated, it should be easy to process, void of long loading times, shouldn’t contain too many fields, and there shouldn’t be any confusion. The checkout design and flow are some of the principal reasons why most consumers abandon a cart.
Just imagine it yourself that you want to process a payment online and you’re finding it difficult to scale through the checkout page because the page keeps loading or it’s just fussy. You definitely wouldn’t be encouraged to proceed to continue your purchase, even if what you want to buy is very important.
Thus, it’s advisable that you keep form fields to a minimum, especially for those making recurring payments, and the number of checkout steps should be reduced as well. The checkout process will be quite better if it’s more streamlined. And, this is very weighty because most customers make impulse buys.
Provide Security and Privacy Assurances
Truth be told, no one wants to risk his or her hard-earned money on a porous website. Even if the money was a gift, the last thing that will come to one’s mind is throwing the money away or putting it at risk. This is exactly what applies to security and privacy.
Of course, you know that sensitive information such as credit card numbers are handled by the checkout pages and it’s your full responsibility to ensure that the privacy and security of the information of your customers are safe.
And, once they’ve been fully convinced that “there’s nothing”, they’ll be glad to keep coming back to make a purchase on your website. Thus, do well to seal user trust significantly by using third-party verification, a seal that signifies SSL encryption, or whatever that works.
Use Clear Calls to Action (CTAs)
It’s very vital that you use Calls to Action (CTAs) that are clear; frequently and prominently. Getting your customers to arrive at the checkout page is often the goal, and if you fail at this, your revenue will stay low, regardless of how high your website traffic is. Figure out the CTA button design that works best for your business and for that, you should run some tests.
Normally, your CTA buttons should be short, bright, and not too large. In creating your CTAs, make sure you use plenty of white space, use words such as “now” or “today only” to create a sense of urgency, safe choices like orange and green are often recommended for the button color, active verbs such as “download”, “checkout”, “get,” and try should be included in your text, and most importantly, your CTAs should be respectively unique and differ from other design elements that surround them.
From creating a sense of user security and using clear and expressive CTAs to offering multiple payment platform options, just make sure you don’t ignore the mobile payment experience of your customers. It’s very important.
