Getting the customer journey and experience right is central to developing trusting relationships with your consumers. Many businesses focus on areas like website copy, product descriptions, how your visitor moves through an eCommerce store, and customer communications—while all these factors are important, there’s another that’s often overlooked: The payment experience.
The payment experience is one of the last interactions that your customer will have with your eCommerce website. Get the payment experience right, and they’ll leave knowing they’ve made a good purchase. Get it wrong, and they will likely leave before completing the transaction, sending them into the arms of a competitor.
You don’t want that to happen, and neither do we. Read on to find out how you can remove friction from the online payment process, use payment technology to make customers happy, and balance speed with security.
Before we get into improving the payment experience, it’s worth exploring how it can go wrong and create friction.
Think about the customer journey once a consumer visits your online store—they will:
All of the friction around payments happens in step five. Let’s look at some of the problems your customer could face:
You can resolve each of these problems through making changes to your payment stack, payment technology, integrations, and payment software settings. Let’s dig into the things you can do right now to ensure a better customer payment experience.
The days of your online customers just using credit or debit cards are behind us. Increasingly, consumers are choosing other payment methods like mobile wallets, cryptocurrencies, or bank transfers. If you want to deliver a great payment experience, you need to let your customers pay through any payment technology:
Customers are increasingly moving to shopping on their smartphones and tablets. Make sure that your shopping cart and payment software works beautifully across every device:
Although your customers want to check out fast, we’re all becoming increasingly aware of the need for online payment security. Card and payment fraud are a major issue, and most consumers appreciate the addition of a little more security into the checkout process. The trick is to balance security with convenience, so you don’t get too many shopping cart abandonments, and still meet your revenue targets:
Most large online businesses will use multiple payment processors to manage customer payments. You might choose to use a different processor depending on how you’re being paid, the volume of transactions, or the amount you’re being charged for processing. From a customer’s perspective, they want processing to be fast and transparent:
False declines are like kryptonite to customers. False declines happen when a legitimate consumer’s payment is rejected, due to issues identified by your fraud detection software, or authorizations and approvals carried out by third parties. You want to reduce false declines as much as possible, while still giving yourself adequate fraud protection against genuine criminals:
The very best payment experience is one that’s almost invisible to the person making the payment. You’ll want to review every part of the payment journey from the customer’s perspective, looking at all the variations and what could go wrong. Once you’ve completed an audit of the customer payment journey, you can dig into the payment technology behind any issues. As you fix underlying problems, continue monitoring how your payment processing is working, and take action if you’re seeing too many cart abandonments and failed payments.
The process of measure, improve, control will help you to continually improve both the customer journey and the payment process, boosting business revenue and consumer trust.