In a crowded market like many of today’s industries have, companies compete to offer not just the best deals but the best payment services. We are here to share with you three simple tactics for offering your customers a welcoming payments gateway to avoid unnecessary frustration.
Provide for Guest Checkout
It does sound like an enticing prospect, but luring your guests to become full-on returning members by not offering them a simplified checkout procedure for single purchases is bad practice. People have come to value their time above anything else, and being forced to spend more of it than they would like to can be extremely annoying. Instead, try offering them a shortcut in order to create a friendly payment environment and improve your chances of seeing them return.
In case you insist that your users must register to pay on your website, make sure you do not ask for an overwhelming amount of input. A time-saving registration process might prevent frustrated first-time users from turning to another vendor.
Keep Your Interface Intuitive
Intuitive is a much-abused attribute that seems to have a rather vague meaning when it comes to navigation. This is because different users are likely to have different ideas of what is intuitive depending on their exposure to technology and general background.
A common piece of advice is to opt for minimalist interfaces and hope that they will be easy to understand. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
While trendy minimal designs do look good, they can fail to sparkle the associations required to make them intuitive. Use common, straightforward templates with minimum redundancy and unnecessary details.
It is also essential that the user knows what the next step is going to be and whether they will be able to go back to the previous one in case they need to change something. Finally, remember to make the checkout page look like it’s part of your general website — seamless interfaces take less time to learn.
Ensure Diversity
Quite apart from creating an ideal customer image, it is good practice to factor in potential deviation from that picture in order to cater to real people acting in real scenarios. This includes offering a variety of payment methods and instruments as well as a number of options in terms of verification as long as it does not compromise security.
Since different shoppers use various devices to pay for their purchases, it is essential that your checkout page is optimized for every reasonably probable option.
Knowing Your Audience Is Key
While the approaches showcased above are very promising in terms of increasing the user appeal of your web store’s checkout procedures, they can become even more effective if you have a clear idea of who you are selling to. Your pay-from-home policy should match your customers’ expectations as closely as possible, so it might be a viable investment of time to study their idea of a comfortable payment procedure before you initiate improvements.
