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According to E-marketer, out of the total of $22.09 trillion spent on retail in the year 2016, eCommerce made up $1.915 trillion or 8.9% of it.
Digital payments are on the rise, and as an e-commerce business owner you have to capitalize on the growth that the eCommerce sector is having. As the online payment systems become more popular, there’s a highly likely chance that the payment processes become more complex to ensure security and prevention of theft and fraud.
The digital payment scenario is a vast mixture of coordination between different entities including customers, banks, payment processor and the vendor. All of the entities mentioned above have one common goal, to achieve the ease of payment during their online shopping experience. A more streamlined and easy payment process would mean happier customers. Happy customers would result in happy retailers and that would bring more business to the industry. Now let’s talk about 4 ways to make ecommerce payments easy:
PROVIDE A VARIETY OF PAYMENT METHODS
According to an infographic, 56% of the people who took part in the survey demanded that the ecommerce websites should have multiple payment options during their check-out process.
This isn’t a hard and fast rule to have multiple payment options but if you analyze your audience and see the kind of payment methods that they use, you’ll be able to understand what kind of payment options should be integrated on your e-commerce website.
Not only that you should have more payment options available for your customers including direct bank transfer, PayPal and accepting debit and credit cards or coupons, you should also advertise this fact on your website.
Advertising this gains customer trust and, as we mentioned above, 56% of the people prefer ecommerce sites that have multiple payment options integrated. An implementation of the above mentioned strategy is done by Offer Factor on their homepage as you can see in the screenshot below.
DON’T ENFORCE USER REGISTRATIONS
A smooth and easy check-out process is the key to make sure that people don’t drop out of your sales funnel during the check-out phase.
There are a large number of customers that drop out during the check-out phase because they find the process too complex. If you are forcing your users to register during the check-out process, stop doing that immediately.
Almost all the information that is required from the customer is gathered during the transaction phase, including their email and phone number. Enforcing customers to register on your website would only make them want to re-consider their decision about shopping on your website.
Giving your users an option during the check-out phase to register is a way to go about it but it does not have to be enforced. You can provide incentives for the shoppers to register or create an account with your website but making it compulsory is not suggested.
An example of this is by Joules, where they give you 2 options during the checkout process:
SIMPLIFY USER FLOW
Providing your visitors the easiest possible shopping journey right from the moment they land on your page to the moment they check out or complete a purchase should be your priority as an ecommerce business owner. Improving the navigation across the website increased the conversion rate by as much as 18%, according to a study.
There are numerous ways to accomplish the simplicity part in your check out process. You should be able to keep your users on your website instead of redirecting them to a third party payment processor like PayPal.
Putting up distracting ads during the checkout process is also something that you do NOT have to do. As an ecommerce business owner, you would like your customer’s attention to be focused on completing the purchase instead of giving them options to navigate to another page.
The consistency of the typography and fonts across the site including the checkout phase is also important. This also includes keeping the colors consistent across the website. There are plenty of phishing scams going around so the checkout page of the website should have the same familiarity as the website itself. This would make the customers feel at ease and perform their checkout worry free. The Nixon store has a great checkout page that has all the elements that we have mentioned above.
KEEP IT SHORT & CLEAR
You only need necessary information from the customers during the checkout process. Filling endless forms would make the customers drop out during the checkout process more often than you’d like them to.
Having a confused customer on your checkout page is the last thing you would want as an ecommerce business owner. The call to action buttons should be clear and the ease of navigation during the checkout process should be provided to the customer. According to a survey, 11% of the adults in US dropped out of the sales funnel during the checkout phase because either the website was asking them to register or it was asking for “too much information”.
The checkout process isn’t an 8000 meter race. Treat it as a 100 meter sprint and you’d be all set. The users would want to be able to check out quickly and smoothly. You have to make sure that your customers feel that they are in control and they clearly understand what is happening during the entire process.
A great tip would be to add a progress bar on the top of the checkout page so that the customers have a clear understanding of where do they stand in the process. The page below by Simply Hike is a perfect example of a simple and effective checkout page. The options are intuitive and the call to actions are clear. The process also seems very simple.
WRAPPING IT UP
We’re sure that the above mentioned methods are surely going to decrease your drop-out rates during the check-out process. It is always a good idea to test out different designs and ideas to see what works the best for you.
We hope that the above mentioned 4 ways to make ecommerce payments easy increase your sales and decrease the dropouts.
