The best thing you can do for your business is to implement a clean, easy and user friendly payment system. Focusing on a clear and concise system will increase sales, build loyalty and reduce cart abandonment.
Understanding reasons for cart abandonment
Abandonment is an ecommerce term used to describe a visitor on a web page who leaves that page before completing the desired action. The most concerning is cart abandonment which refers to customers who have added items or services to their cart with the intent to purchase but have exited the page before the purchase is complete.
A Baymard Institute study on cart abandonment found the top reasons for abandonment to be:
- Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees) 55%
- The site wanted me to create an account 34%
- A tedious or complicated checkout process 26%
- I didn’t trust the site with my credit card information 17%
- Delivery was too slow 16%
- There weren’t enough payment methods 6%
- Card was declined 4%
How to build a user friendly payment journey
Creating a user friendly payment journey is easy. Consider the following points when you’re designing the payment process for your customers.
- Allow payment to be taken without creating an account
Speed up the payment process and please your customer by negating the need to create an account on site. Your customers want a streamlined payment process and often the need to create an account, confirm email and activate account creates too many frustrating stages to the payment process. Instead, consider what data you actually need to capture and allow your customer to checkout or submit payment with minimal interference.
With splink the payment process is simple. Your customers are not required to create an account at any stage and can quickly checkout with a few clicks.
- Offer multiple payment options
Credit card payment options are a no-brainer, but today, consumers have more choices than ever before of how to pay for goods online. Mobile payment systems such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet are becoming increasingly popular, particularly among younger demographics. Consider a system that accepts these payments as these will streamline and simply mobile payments.
Splink accepts multiple payment options including Apple Pay and Google Wallet to ensure your customers are always equipped to make a speedy purchase.
- Be clear about costs upfront – especially shipping.
Customers who reach the cart or checkout phase and find additional shipping or tax costs may experience price shock and decide to abandon the process. To overcome this, be clear about shipping costs and tax from the point of browsing. This might mean creating a “Shipping and Delivery” page for your site, updating your FAQ to outline your costs, or adding a simple shipping calculator to your product pages. These solutions will help minimize surprises for shoppers at checkout and increase the likelihood of conversion.
With splink you can input the final cost for your customers.
- Build trust and safety.
Customers need to know that their online purchase is safe and that their information is protected. Achieve this by ensuring your site has a valid SSL certificate or include logos from reputable security companies e.g. VeriSign, Truste, Norton. Another key component to this is ensuring that your payment process is on brand and connected to your business and is in keeping with the tone and feel of your business.
Splink is PCI compliant.
- Optimise page loading times.
According to Visual Website Optimizer, ecommerce shopping cart conversion rates drop 7% for every one-second delay in your page loading. Checkout pages that are slow to load will frustrate customers and likely direct their attention to competitors.
Splink requires one simple payment page, minimising loading and wait times.