You’ve worked hard to convince visitors to shop from you — and even
harder to get them to the checkout page. So why on earth would you make
it so painfully difficult for people to give you their money?
An astounding
two-thirds of shopping carts
are reportedly abandoned at the payment stage. Given the hoops many
websites make their visitors jump through just to enter payment details,
it’s no wonder. Few buyers would tolerate such friction at the point of
purchase in a brick-and-mortar store. They’d just walk out.
Your payment stage is where visitors become buyers. Here are six
steps to streamlining this critical last step in your conversion funnel.
1. Optimize For Clarity & Usability
Whether you employ a single page or a multi-step checkout process,
online shoppers will eventually encounter your payment page. Nobody
really likes parting with their money, so it makes a lot of sense to
optimize the page design to improve the user experience.
Keep Your Payment Form Short, Simple And Clear. The first step in minimizing friction is to make it
appear
very fast and simple to enter payment details. Perception is critical.
If your page layout looks confusing and your forms ask for too much
information, you’ll discourage customers from going further.
Reduce clutter on your payment form by including only elements that
are absolutely necessary for the transaction. Then, once you’ve visually
convinced buyers that the payment step will be quick and painless, make
it so.
Don’t require special formats for credit card numbers – if they want
to enter their card number with hyphens (or without), let them. Your
form should be very accepting of how users enter their data. Help
shoppers by auto-populating information where possible (e.g.,
pre-filling the address field for visitors that are signed into their
accounts, or automatically choosing the card type based on the
customer’s credit card number).
Cosmetics retailer Ulta.com allows users to automatically populate a billing address with the shopper’s shipping address.
Anticipate And Reduce Frustration From Errors. As an
online shopper, I find it extremely annoying when a site wipes out the
entire form after I inadvertently type in wrong information in one
field. Clearing a form is the easiest way to turn off customers,
especially when they’re inputting their credit card details. Luckily,
you can easily solve this by submitting your form in AJAX, which allows
you to preserve form information without storing sensitive financial
data in your servers.
2. Address Security Concerns
Shoppers’ awareness of online shopping-related risks is naturally
heightened at the payment stage, so go the extra mile in reassuring
them.
Make sure your payment page looks consistent with your entire website
and is professionally designed. The last thing you want is to trigger
alarms in your shopper’s brain with a payment page that looks nothing
like the website they just visited. Any visitor would also balk at
giving personal and financial information to a poorly-designed form for
fear of an insecure transaction.
Improve shoppers’ perception of security by displaying trust badges
and encryption information prominently and in close proximity to
sensitive form fields (where credit card information is required, for
instance). A
study
conducted by Baymard Institute shows that the presence of security
icons on certain parts of a checkout page served as visual
reinforcements for shoppers, which tended to view these parts as more
secure compared to the rest of the page.
Notice
how prominent the Norton seal is on Home Depot’s payment page.
Pre-checkout, the seal is tucked away in the footer, but it takes center
stage once buyers enter the checkout process.
3. Offer Multiple Ways To Pay
Accepting a variety of payment methods on your site ensures that your
visitors will have at least one viable option at checkout. In addition
to major credit cards, consider expanding payment options to include
PayPal, Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, Bill Me Later, or BitCoin.
Of course, your decision on which payment types to accept should be
based upon your audience profile. For instance, BitCoin may not be used
by a large percentage of your visitors, and if you know you get a lot of
visitors using iOS devices, you might consider implementing Apple Pay.
Build.com
offers Amazon Payment and PayPal in addition to major credit cards. For
buyers who are reluctant to enter payment information, having the
option of using their existing payment accounts is reassuring.
There is a caveat, however. Increasing the number of payment methods
can also increase the complexity of your payment page. Too many choices
can hinder decision-making and lead to choice paralysis. So, before you
rush into adding a bunch of payment methods to your page, plan your
design carefully. Pay attention to steps you can take to nudge users
into quickly choosing the most appropriate payment method for them.
Then, minimize confusion by showing only the fields relevant to the
shopper’s chosen payment method.
4. Fix Fat Finger Challenges
Payment pages are especially tricky on smaller screens. According to
research done by SeeWhy,
99.5% of mobile users will bail out before buying. And a major cause of
friction is any place where the user is required to enter information.
Here are some things you can do to improve the payment process for mobile buyers.
- Don’t require your customers to create an account to check out, but
if you do remember customers’ account details (as is the case with
Amazon), give them the option of logging in so they can access stored
payment methods, shipping address and other account details.
- Minimize the customer’s effort by using technology to pre-fill information.
For example, instead of asking for postal code as the last part of the
address, put it before the city and state, and then pre-populate those
fields based on the data entered for the postal code.
- Visually reinforce mobile shoppers’ sense of security with well-placed badges, icons and copy.
- Provide shoppers with several payment methods. According to SeeWhy’s Mobile Playbook 2014, mobile consumers are twice as likely to convert when given alternatives to entering credit card details.
- Show progress indicators to set customer’s expectation of how long the process will take, and to let them know where they are in the process.
- Error handling is an even bigger issue given how tedious it already
is to enter information on small screens. Minimize frustration by having
bigger text fields and buttons and clearly indicating which fields are
causing errors.
5. Understand The Needs Of International Customers
If you sell to customers outside of your home country, you probably
already know how challenging it can be to process international
payments. Credit cards can be hard to authorize for international
addresses. And even preferred payment methods will vary depending on the
customer’s country.
According to eConsultancy’s “
Internationalisation of E-commerce Best Practice Guide,”
Germans prefer to pay through ELV and debit card, while Scandinavians
prefer to pay by cash on delivery. Not surprisingly, customers will also
want to pay in their local market currency, so you will need to work
with your payment service provider to make this possible.
Bonus Tip: If you currently don’t process
international orders, say so upfront. Don’t wait until customers are
deep into the checkout process before telling them that you don’t accept
non-U.S. cards or don’t deliver to other countries.
6. Speed Up Payment Processing
Even after your customer has entered his or her payment details, your
optimization job is not complete. Payment processing and authorization
speed is just as crucial as getting the customer to fill out the payment
form.
When customers finally click that “place order” button on your site,
do they end up watching a spinning circle for 5, 10, even 15 seconds
before being taken to the confirmation page? The longer the spinning
circle goes on, the more anxious customers get.
A study from the
Aberdeen Group reveals
that a one-second delay in page load time decreases customer
satisfaction by 16%. Imagine how much worse this is for people who have
just given away their credit card information.
The time between clicking the “place order” button to the
confirmation page should almost be instantaneous. Check how long it
takes for your payment processor to authorize and confirm payments on
different internet providers and devices, and address any performance
issues you notice. If necessary, get a new payment processor.
Conclusion
Optimizing your payment process may be one of the least exciting
projects you take on during this final pre-holiday push, but it can
easily deliver the most impact. With all the effort that goes into
offering the right products, optimizing conversion funnels, designing
campaigns and driving targeted traffic, you owe it to your company, and
your visitors, to make it as easy as possible for buyers to give you
their money.
