Say hello to frictionless selling with these best practice tips
Your payment processing is one of the most important aspects of your customers’ journey, but too often, it is merely an afterthought. Too many businesses don’t put enough effort into perfecting their payment process, and then come to find it is much more difficult than they had predicted. When this happens, your customers encounter “point of sale friction.”
During point of sale friction, the customer goes to pay for their product or service and they are faced with a number of barriers. The system asks them to enter their information multiple times, only to be redirected, asked to create an account, or to find that the website does not accept their payment method. Talk about an online shopper’s nightmare! The entire process is enough to leave them with a bad taste in their mouths, even if their experience with your business was positive up to that point.
The truth is that payment modes have not kept pace with the rate that technology has evolved. That is why customers visit beautiful websites with top-of-the-line offerings, but have so much anxiety about actually making a purchase. If you can remove as many of these barriers as possible, you will be sure to stick out from the competition. If you are looking to make your payment process as simple as possible, here are some steps you can take:
- Open a merchant account
Put simply, a merchant is a business bank account. It serves as the middleman between your business and your customers’ payment methods. If you’ve ever been to a “cash only” business, they have these limitations because they don’t have a merchant account, and it can be quite an inconvenience for customers. If you want to accept payments online, a merchant account is an absolute must.
- Choose the best payment gateway for your business
A payment gateway is another necessary service for businesses that want to accept online payments. Whether your customers realize it or not, when they enter their credit card information, it goes into a gateway, which sends it to your processor. Some of the most popular payment gateways as of this moment are Braintree, Stax, Stripe, Helcim, Square, Payment Depot, and Merchant One. When you open a merchant account, it might come with a payment gateway, but you are not required to use it. Feel free to shop around and find the best payment gateway for your needs. You want to consider what kinds of services you offer, what features you require, and which gateways your area supports.
- Offer Apple Pay and Google Wallet options
In general, you want to be sure to provide the widest range of payment methods possible so no customer is left behind. If you are not an avid user of Apple Pay or Google Wallet, you might not realize just how popular it is. Over 85% of retailers in the U.S. accept Apple Pay, so your customers might feel inconvenienced if they are used to this form of payment.
If you are not used to this form of payment, on the other hand, Scorpion is here to help. When you set up a Scorpion account, you can manage the most popular contactless payment methods. This makes transactions easier for your customers and for you.
- Avoid making the process overly extensive
You might be surprised how often customers rethink their online purchase thanks to an extensive payment process. Not only can a long payment process be irritating, but it also makes your customers more skeptical of your business. Although their “checkout” can be a great way for you to gather important data such as their email address, you should never force them to create an account or ask for more information than what is necessary. You should also avoid redirects during the checkout process as much as possible. Giving your customers the impression that you are working with a lot of third parties will make them more wary of your business. You want the checkout to be the most exciting time of their journey with you, not an area of stress.
- Only use secure websites for business transactions
Would you want to enter your information into an insecure website? After many nightmare stories of identity theft, you would probably avoid this, and so would your customers. That is why a secure website with an SSL certificate is so important when it comes to online payments. SSL certificates let customers know that the website they are using is safe. While some customers might not think to check for a certificate, the customers that know to do this will likely never return to your business if they can’t find it.
There are a few ways to obtain a certificate, such as verifying your website’s information, generating the Certificate Signing Request (CSR), and simply installing the certificate. Costs of going through a trusted authority that provides certificates can vary, but it will typically be about $100 a year. The good news is that businesses that work with Scorpion will receive an SSL certificate automatically. That is just one of the many ways we work to make your business run smoothly.
Need some help improving your online payment process? Scorpion has the payment process solutions you need, as well as a full suite of marketing services and technology. Take the first step and contact us today.
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