Call Sales: +1 (833) 437-3835
Call Sales: +1 (833) 437-3835
Jake Rheude | October 28, 2021 |
The past few years will forever be remembered as the time when years worth of eCommerce adoption and growth happened in just a matter of months. It thrust businesses big and small, online and brick-and-mortar, into a scramble to adapt.
We’ve seen many new trends emerge since the pandemic began, and all of them point to some simple truths: Customers aren’t going anywhere. They will be more selective than ever. Across all facets of your operations, from the experience of internal search optimization to the way you handle customer returns, you will have to do better and be better to earn their dollars.
Capitalize that potential spending by offering your customers more online payment tools and capabilities. You can leverage these internally for partners and your own contracts with similar remote payment systems for invoices. We know that improving checkout pages can boost eCommerce conversion rates and ROI generally, but the same lessons may improve your business relationships too. Here’s how to get started.
If you haven’t done so yet, enable Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal One Touch, and any other 1-click payment systems into your checkout process. Customers love them for in-store and online payments. Merchants who have used Magento’s version of 1-click payments have reported that the time it takes to complete an order has decreased by 90 percent.
That’s a huge pain point addressed by making it easier for people to buy from you. While it’s mostly upside, there are a few caveats to keep in mind if you decide to add this faster payment process.
If you’ve set up a website to accept payments in the last year or so, you may have overlooked mobile design in the rush to offer a viable alternative to in-person card transactions. Mobile versions of websites designed primarily for desktop can have visual and input errors. Always test mobile options and look for elements like cart plugins that have native mobile support.
Common issues include slow loading time, comically small buttons, tiny text fields, and disjointed layouts, among other design problems. These issues can directly affect your mobile checkout page, and not in the best way. If you’re not a designer, hire someone who is to troubleshoot and redesign your payment page so that it’s seamless.
Forcing a first-time visitor to go through the tedium of setting up a user account on your website before buying has been a no-no for years now. And yet a maddening number of websites do just that. The obvious downside to this is increased abandoned shopping carts because of the hassle to create a username and password. There’s also a security liability that comes with storing sensitive information that hackers may target.
Some incentives like a loyalty program, discounts, or free shipping could help sway someone to set up an account. So, make those optional to not scare off customers in a hurry.
A needlessly complicated aspect of eCommerce is multi-step checkouts. Keep it all on one page. Design the process so that once the customer starts to checkout, the page doesn’t refresh until the order is confirmed. You’ll save yourself a marginal amount of lost sales in the event someone’s page crashes while loading the next step of the checkout.
At the same time, remove outbound links and unnecessary from this checkout page. You don’t want to give people a chance to click away and avoid the purchase. Extra buttons and links are a distraction you can’t afford. The same is true for things like customer phone numbers you don’t use. Trim down the page and give customers useful options, like a checkbox that automatically makes shipping and billing addresses the same.
For high ticket items, giving customers the chance to split a payment into smaller parts could open up sales opportunities previously out of reach. If you have the cash flow to do it, letting customers make automated recurring payments instead could be a huge moral win. There’s clearly a lot of momentum behind installment payments, including directly from eCommerce platforms like Shopify. It makes bigger purchases seem a little less daunting, encouraging your hungry audience.
This is a smart area to look for broader support and functionality from payment services. See what you can use for your own business or what you can offer vendors and partners. Setting recurring payments for services you use or provide also makes it easier to budget, helping both sides of the coin.
In certain circumstances, especially B2B contracting work, you might not have the option of letting customers go to a checkout page and pay for goods or services themselves. Because of factors like hours worked, materials, planning, and the like, the easiest solution may be to invoice the customer directly.
Remote invoicing simplifies the payment process by sending the customer a link to a hosted payment form so that they can enter payment details into their own device is a win-win. You both get clear records while the payment gateway handles the processing, giving you both greater security and safety.
While it’s critical to center the customer as you design the payment experience, don’t forget that you, the business owner, have to deal with payments too. As it is, you probably receive dozens of different bills, statements, invoices, tax records from various third-party vendors. Why complicate things any more than necessary when it comes to payments?
Many merchants use one payment provider for the retail side of things and another for their online business. Consider consolidating your payments services to create a better experience for your customers and your staff. Give yourself the benefits you’ve worked hard to create for others.
Jake Rheude is the Vice President of Marketing for Red Stag Fulfillment, an eCommerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of eCommerce. He has years of experience in eCommerce and business development. In his free time, Jake enjoys reading about business and sharing his own experience with others.
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