Maintaining a positive user experience is key to a successful e-commerce business. While this factor is crucial throughout the process, it is particularly important when it comes to the method you choose for accepting online payments. Said simply, making payment processes easier to boosts e-commerce sales.
Consider this hypothetical situation: You’ve shopped for your product, done all your research and made your selection. Then, when you try to pay for it, you’re asked 15 different questions, few of which seem to have anything to do with paying for the product. You’re then asked to click through several screens, culminating in being rerouted to an unfamiliar site to complete the transaction.
How likely are you to go through with it?
Exactly.
1. Your Gateway Choice Is Critical
First and foremost, your payment gateway should convey trustworthiness. If it looks out of place, is clunky to use or calls attention to itself for any reason, it’s going to cost your business. In addition to security, your payment gateway must offer a simplistic user interface. People want a hassle-free method of transferring funds. The more you give them to think about, the less likely they are to complete the transaction. The application should also be robust; crashing in the middle of the process is a definite turn-off. Response time also needs to be reasonable (within two seconds or less).
2. Minimal Clicks
Back in 1999, Amazon patented the one-click ordering process. Impulse buying came to the internet in a huge fashion with this development. The patent expired in September of 2017, leaving all merchants free to incorporate the tech. Relieving customers of the requirement to supply the same information repeatedly makes it easier for them to buy. This, in turn, improves sales. If your payment gateway offers a “Remember Me” option, customers will happily avail themselves of its convenience.
3. Avoid Redirection
A good way to raise red flags for shoppers is having them click on a “Pay Now” button and sending them to a site with which they have no prior experience. In addition to disorienting them, you’re asking them to transfer whatever faith they had in your site to a completely different one. It’s always better to keep users on your site, so they can pay you quickly and with ease. If you’re building your site using one of the available free website themes, be certain it is capable of accommodating this.
4. Mobile Friendliness
Most of the time spent online shopping is mobile, but the bulk of online sales currently happen on the desktop. However, the portable shopper is rapidly gaining prominence. If you want to avoid losing sales, you’ll need to configure your site. Sometimes people get the impulse to shop and buy on the spot. Your payment process must be capable of accommodating this to capture spontaneous sales.
5. Attractive/Cohesive Design
The best checkout solution will integrate seamlessly with the rest of your site, closely mimicking its look and feel. A poor design here could be the thing that turns a customer off and sends them to a competing site. Be careful to ensure the esthetics of your payment gateway page look credible. Above all, your payment form must look like it belongs to your website to allay any potential concerns of fraud or hacking.
Since making payment processes easier to boosts e-commerce sales, consider incorporating these elements toward the end of your sales funnel. Bottom line: If you avoid anything capable of giving your customers second thoughts, they are more likely to complete their transactions.