Failing to provide a seamless checkout process that guarantees secure transactions is likely to have an adverse impact on your customers’ experience. This can lead to high cart abandonment rates and negatively affect your business’s profitability.
The payment system you use has a massive impact on how your customers feel about buying from your business. In this article, we’ll explore the five payment factors that affect the customer experience and how you can enhance these to improve your shoppers’ satisfaction.
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5 Ways Your Payment System Impacts the Customer Experience
You can drastically improve your customers’ experience by providing a secure, frictionless payment process that suits the way your buyers shop.
1. Offering Plenty of Ways to Pay
In a recent survey, consumer insights publication CMSWire found that 70% of customers are willing to pay more for their products and services if they’re guaranteed a convenient buying experience.
One of the best ways to make the shopping experience more convenient is by letting your customers pay using their favorite payment methods. This gives your buyers a sense of control over their shopping experience and reduces friction at checkout, enhancing the shopping experience and reducing the chances of cart abandonment.
2. Creating a Seamless Experience
Customers expect consistency throughout their shopping experience. If they go to checkout and find that your payment gateway looks different to your online store, they may doubt its legitimacy and could shy away from completing their purchase.
Although these inconsistencies can make customers doubt the authenticity and security of your store (we’ll discuss that a little later), this is a relatively easy problem to overcome. To increase trust and enhance the customer experience, you’ll want to ensure that your checkout page has the same look and feel as the rest of your site.
3. Enabling Ease of Use
Ease of use goes hand in hand with creating a seamless experience. This means that your checkout page should not only look the same as the rest of your website, but also be intuitive to use by making it clear which steps buyers need to take next (e.g. clearly displaying cart totals, shipping costs, purchase progress, and available payment options).
Another factor to consider here is mobile usability. A survey conducted by PwC showed that 43% of consumers across Europe shop online using mobile devices, so ensuring your payment gateway works – and works well – on mobile is essential.
A responsive design with tap-friendly fields, buttons, and other clickable elements are features to look out for when choosing a payment platform.
4. Providing Quick Payments
Making a buyer jump through multiple hoops to finalize their order increases friction, slows the purchasing process, and will likely lead to cart abandonment. In fact, user experience research organization Baymard Institute found in a recent study that 26% of shoppers who abandoned their carts did so because the checkout process was too long.
The best way to increase the speed with which buyers can checkout is by adding a Buy Now button to your website. This button will take your customers directly to your checkout page and, if they’ve purchased from your store before, can eschew the need for them to enter their details (like Amazon’s One-Click button).
5. Instilling a Sense of Security
Ecommerce has exploded over the past couple of years. Of course, with the opportunities this brings for accessing payment information, cybercrime has increased in lockstep with online transactions. Something that buyers are acutely aware of.
Customers want to be assured that when they interact with your business online, their personal and payment information is kept safe. Offering signals like security certification badges from recognized bodies, requiring multi-factor authentication, and using an address verification service can all help to do this.
What to Look For in a Payment Service Provider
Customer experience is, of course, a critical factor in deciding which payment service provider (PSP) you’ll work with. However, you’ll also want to be certain that the infrastructure they provide meets your business needs and can be integrated with your existing systems.
Here are a few factors you should keep in mind when looking for a PSP:
- Payment methods: Ensure that your PSP allows you to accept a range of traditional and alternative payment methods from customers across the globe. This includes credit and debit cards, digital wallets, and ACH transfers.
- Flexibility: The infrastructure you settle on should offer a flexible payments API that can easily integrate into your existing platform to ensure a seamless experience for your customers.
- Security: Look out for service providers that tokenize your customers’ card details in transit, comply with PCI DSS standards (the body regularly audits and tests online security measures), and offer multi-factor authentication like 3D Secure 2.0.
- Ease of use: Think about whether the PSPs you’re considering automatically customize the payment process for whichever device your customers use to transact.. Keep your needs in mind here, too. You’ll want to ensure that the backend of the infrastructure you choose makes managing your payments easy.
- Customer insights: Your payment infrastructure should come with analytics and reporting features that enable you to better understand how your customers interact with your business, and help you to make more informed decisions.
The Benefits of Working With Pay.com as Your Payment Service Provider
Pay.com’s full-service payment infrastructure has all of the features you need to ensure an excellent customer experience while giving you all the data necessary to drive better business decisions.
Your customers can choose from a wide variety of payment methods, from debit and credit cards to digital wallets and other alternative payment methods. Better still, you can add these options to your checkout process in just a few clicks via your Pay Dashboard.
Our powerful infrastructure is also highly secure, with credit card details tokenized in transit to protect your customer’s data from falling into the wrong hands. What’s more, we support 3D Secure 2.0, which adds three layers of authentication so that you can reduce the likelihood of fraudulent transactions for your business.
Click here to create your Pay.com account now.
The Bottom Line: Creating a Good Customer Experience Is Good for Business
It’s not only your customers who benefit from faster, seamless, and more secure transactions – your business does too. The average cart abandonment rate across devices is about 75%, which means a large chunk of potential profits are left on the table each month.
Shoppers who have been surveyed about the reasons why they leave goods behind give a variety of answers, but the ones that crop up most often are long checkout processes and concerns about security.
Fortunately, you can drastically reduce the rate of cart abandonment that your business experiences. One way to do this is by working with a payment service provider whose infrastructure enables a quick, efficient, and secure checkout process. This, in turn, will increase profitability and lead to sustained business growth in the long term.
With Pay.com, you can accept a variety of payment methods via your customizable checkout page. With a lightning-fast payment process that’s automatically optimized for the device they’re using, your customers will be able to shop in confidence without any frustrating delays.
Click here to get started now!
