The success of your retail business is significantly affected by customer experience. If you want to increase traffic to your website, boost sales, and see your customer base continually growing you need to provide a seamless user experience. And so much of this revolves around improving the customer payment journey.
In this article, we will be sharing how you can improve the customer payment journey online so that you can attract more customers, increase sales, reduce bounce rates, and become a trusted and reliable authority within your industry.
What is the Customer Payment Journey?
If you don’t know what the customer payment journey is, it’s basically the steps your customers take to pay for your products or services. It is a journey that can be tracked, using tools such as Google Analytics, to show how your customers discovered your company through to how and when they made a payment.
Understanding the customer payment journey is essential to bettering your online user experience. When you understand the payment journey, you can make improvements that matter to your customers.
Using this information you can understand the obstacles your customers must overcome, such as:
- Checkout glitches
- Insufficient product information
- Payment windows that do not load
- Insufficient mobile optimisation
Ultimately, make changes to your retail business that provides real value to your customers.
So, let’s take a look at some of the ways you can improve the customer payment journey online.
Make Paying Convenient
When it comes to accepting card payments for your retail business, customers expect to be provided with a process that makes paying for products or services easier than ever before.
If the customer payment journey isn’t up to scratch, you could be turning customers away. According to the National Retail Federation, “97% of consumers have backed out of a purchase because it was inconvenient to them.” If you want to retain customers and see them returning to purchase more in the future, you need to make paying convenient.
Keep reading to find out how you can achieve this.
Reduce Steps to Checkout
Have you ever tried to pay for something online only to be navigated to a new window to enter your card details? You then spend time filling out your card details, typing in the address, and selecting your delivery option only for the page to time out.
We’ve all been there.
However, it should be easy for customers to enter their payment information, select their delivery choice, and checkout. The more steps involved in this process the less likely they are to complete the sale. Once a customer has made the decision to buy your services or products you want to ensure they make their purchase as quickly and easily as possible. A few great ways to do this include:
- Listing the steps in the checkout process
- Providing a faster checkout option
- Offer multiple payment options
- Remove pop-ups and email subscription boxes
- Keep things simple
The best way to reduce steps at the checkout is to view the process from the point of view of someone who is in a rush. They’ve got less than five minutes to make their payment and catch the bus into work. So, they don’t want to see ads popping up all over the place and they definitely don’t want to deal with filling out long forms. They want to keep things simple. So, that’s what you should aim for. Hopefully, the points we’ve shared above should help.
Improve User Experience
Did you know that great user experience directly leads to online conversions? How well your website works and how effectively it meets the needs of your customers will impact your company’s success. The better the user experience, the more sales you will make.
However, improving user experience isn’t just about making more sales. It’s also about improving the customer payment journey. After all, user experience impacts how your website works, from navigation and product selection through to chatbot features and making payments.
Making it easy for customers to navigate through your site, browse your products, add or remove products from their shopping card, and pay with ease is all part of improving the customer payment journey online. Learning how to improve user experience could do with an article of its own, but below are a few of the most important points:
- Create clear calls to action
- Implement responsive website design
- Provide 24/7 customer support with chatbots
- Optimise page load speed time
- Break up text with engaging images
- Create a site that’s mobile friendly
The easier it is for users to navigate your website, find what they are looking for, and make a payment, the better. Users crave convenience. And that’s what shopping online is all about.
Accept Payments from Multiple Channels
We live in a digital world and that means your customers aren’t just shopping in-store or on your website, but they are also shopping from social media, mobile apps, and SMS. And so, in order to keep up your sales, you should accept payments from these channels also.
The more multi-channelled your retail business is, the more customers you will connect with. Customers are experiencing more and more the convenience of purchasing a product or hiring a service with the click of a button.
There is no longer any need to send a cheque to the bank or make a payment over the phone. Payments can now be made through applications, social media accounts, and websites. The more accepting you are of these multiple payment options from multiple channels, the more customers you will have seeking your business.
Save Credit Card Details Securely
If you have regular customers, it’s important to put just as much effort into serving them effectively as you do trying to attract new customers. Having regular, loyal customers is extremely valuable for businesses and can go a long way to ensuring that your retail business is successful. So, it’s important to reward these customers with an improved customer payment journey online.
Often, returning customers find it extremely frustrating when they come to pay and find they have to go through the entire process all over again. Sadly, this can turn many customers away. Providing an option for returning customers to create an account where their payment details can be stored securely is an excellent way to improve the customer payment journey.
All a customer has to do is log into their account, where all their payment and delivery details are already filled in, and place their order. It really is that easy. Saving credit card details in this way provides real value to your customers and is a great way to encourage new and returning customers to keep using your business.
Ensure Your Payment Process is Mobile Friendly
We touched on this briefly in the point about website usability, however mobile optimisation is one of the best ways to improve the customer payment journey. Over half of the world’s population shops online from their mobile devices. So, if your website is not optimised for mobile you could be turning away a significant number of potential customers.
If you want to improve the customer payment journey, it’s time to optimise for mobile. You could even create an application that allows your customers to place their orders and seamlessly make their payments. Of course, mobile optimisation plays a huge role in the customer journey online but it can be the make or break moment when it comes down to making online payments.
Final Words
As you can see, there are many ways you can improve the customer payment journey online. And if you’re doing all of these things but your customers are still abandoning their carts, maybe it’s time to ask them what they’d like to see on your website. Sometimes, the best way to make valuable, lasting changes is to ask for customer feedback.
We hope you have found this article useful and that it has provided some pointers on how to improve the customer payment journey. We hope you use this information to make changes on your website that help drive more conversions for your retail business.
