The quicker the payment process is, the more sales you’ll get. This goes for everything from waiting in line in the supermarket to filling in endless fields buying online. So if you’re looking to sell (and who isn’t) then the first thing you need to do in 2014 is to streamline your payment process.
Diversify Your Methods
Providing more than one way to pay makes it more likely that customers will buy. While it’s not practical or advisable to offer lots and lots of different payment types, you should do your research into your target audience and see which they prefer. This is true whether you’re asking for payment in a shop or online, and is even true for traditional cash payments like taxis.
Ecommerce retailers can easily offer a variety of payment methods, but you can make your site especially lucrative if you allow for mobile payments too.
Don’t Over Complicate It
One of the worst things that you can do with online payments is to ask a potential customer to make an account before they buy. While it might be a good way to build up your email marketing list, it’s a major turn off for potential consumers. Not only does it make it take longer to buy anything, the anticipation of a flood of marketing emails is enough to make anyone abandon their basket. It isn’t essential for buying in a physical shop, so why is it necessary for online payments?
Instead, offer the option to buy without creating an account, and make it quick, easy and unobtrusive to buy products from you.
You can still offer the option to create an account – it is often beneficial for returning customers – but make it as easy as possible. Their email address and name should be all you need.
Don’t Forget About the Shop
It’s easy to talk about making payment easy online, and forget about making it easy in your high street shop too. Having as many payment terminals as possible is essential, so why not use something like Card Cutter’s mobile credit card terminals to make your customers’ lives as easy as possible. They work just the same as the ones you see on trains or in restaurants, so you can take payment from your customers anywhere on your shop floor. This means that customers don’t have to queue, and can walk away happy and likely to return.
