The checkout process is an integral part of the user experience. Make it too complicated and you risk boring your customers, make it too simple and you risk rousing their suspicion. From our experience, as the leading payment orchestration platform, we have put together some of the biggest customer turnoffs when it comes to the checkout and what merchants can do to ensure they provide a seamless experience that improves conversion rates.
Forced account creation: don’t insist that your customer create an account in order to complete their purchase. Do create a guest checkout, enabling a quick checkout experience.
Hidden charges: don’t sneak in additional costs (taxes, shipping, etc.). Do provide all fees and charges upfront, so the customer knows exactly how much they will be spending.
Payment methods: don’t expect all consumers to pay the same way. Do provide payment methods relevant to your markets and core target group.
Complex and confusing process: don’t make it too complicated. Do keep it simple. Provide a quick and seamless checkout experience and reduce the likelihood that your customers will get bored and buy elsewhere.
Security: don’t underestimate the customer. Do provide reassurance when they are entering billing, shipping, and personal information. Provide it to them by displaying security badges when possible and offer a secure experience when using your shop. Customers are also more likely to feel secure if you provide them with a payment method they are comfortable with.
Device Optimisation: don’t expect one checkout experience to work across all devices. Do create optimal checkout scenarios for desktop, mobile, apps, and so on.
What can merchants do to address this on a practical level?
Offer the right payment methods for your consumers. A payment method is simply the term used for how a consumer makes a purchase. As transactions become more digitised, it is best practice for merchants to provide a relevant mix of online payment options to encourage customers to make a purchase and increase sales. Every market has its own preferred methods, and demographics within that have their specific go-tos.
How can merchants easily provide multiple payment options?
An effective way to provide your customers with multiple payment options is by using a payment orchestration platform. A payment orchestration or payment management platform provides merchants with a seamless connection to a variety of payment methods via adapters to payments service providers (PSPs), acquirers, and alternative payment methods (APMs). These adapters/connections are all managed from one simple integration. Of course, a merchant does not need to use a payment orchestration platform. They can build integrations directly with payment service providers/acquirers. However, this option may not be compatible with expansion and does not allow for much flexibility of independence on the merchant’s side. As a company grows and adds more products or expands into new markets, they need to provide different checkout experiences to match their products and/or markets.
Give your customers security
It is very off-putting for customers when they come to pay, if they are then sent to a different page which does not have any company branding and appears to have no tangible link to the merchant, it is not uncommon for them to get cold feet. Give your customers’ confidence and create simple and branded checkout forms. For example, with IXOPAY, you can use its built-in Frontend Application Server Technology (FAST) to create and publish optimised payment pages easily. You can combine HTML and CSS with popular programming languages such as JavaScript and PHP, so you can create a visually seamless shopping experience. This will boost consumer confidence and improve conversion rates.
Tailor the checkout experience with dynamic method selection
Providing customers with local payment methods (e.g. SOFORT in German-speaking countries, iDEAL in the Netherlands, and BACS in the UK) is essential if you want to ensure you are providing a valuable checkout experience. By using a payment orchestration platform, like IXOPAY, you can create a flexible and dynamic solution which displays the most suitable payment methods for an individual customer and hides the ones which are not relevant.
It also gives you a range of flexible options for configuring which payment methods are available for a customer to select from. In addition to optimising by regional payment methods based on the customer’s country of origin, you can also cater to other use cases, such as blocking specific payment methods (e.g. credit cards) for customers with a high-risk profile – in these circumstances you may want to offer these customers a payment method that does not include a chargeback option.
Recurring customers
Make it easier for customers to make repeat purchases. By storing their payment instruments in a PCI-DSS vault, return users can quickly make purchases without having to fill in all their payment details. This gives them security and simplifies the checkout experience allowing them to make instant purchases.
By consolidating your payment stack with a payment orchestration layer you can offer your customers a consistent, safe, and simple checkout experience. Last thing, don’t forget to make sure that your checkout experience is consistent across all devices. More and more people are shopping from their smartphones, tablets, and making in-app purchases. By providing tailored experiences for all these scenarios you will increase conversion rates and gain loyal customers. IXOPAY providers enterprise merchants with a full payment infrastructure. Find out what else a leading payment orchestration platform can do for your business.
About Rene Siegl
Rene is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the IXOLIT Group, which was founded in 2001. Since 2014 Rene has been leading the development of the IXOPAY Payment Orchestration Platform, which addresses the global payment scaling needs of online merchants and licensed payment institutions.
About IXOPAY
IXOPAY is a scalable and PCI-certified payment orchestration platform for white label clients and enterprise merchants. The modern, easily extendable architecture enables the orchestration of payments, provides intelligent routing and cascading functions as well as state-of-the-art risk management, automated reconciliation, and settlements along with plugin-based integration of acquirers and PSPs.
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