Your payment system plays a fundamental role in the success of your company. It allows you to take payments from your clients and process sensitive information. However, the way it’s done may affect your sales – and in turn, your profits. If you have noticed a lot of abandoned shopping carts or received complaints about payment, you may need to make a few changes. Fortunately, there are several strategies that can help you bypass these issues. Here are some tips for establishing an efficient payment system that will help your business reach its full potential.
Consider Your Options
Many business owners think that accepting debit and credit cards is the most efficient way to take payments. When in fact, most issues occur during the long and complicated process of credit card transactions. With so many safer and faster ways to pay, customers want to be able to choose the one that’s the most convenient for them. To avoid issues with existing customers and attract new ones, you should offer several different payment options. EMV, contactless and mobile payments are just some of the choices you can provide. To save money, customers often purchase for others as well and will ask you to divide the amount between them. This is a popular feature many businesses offer – but is only available for certain types of transactions.
If you are conducting international transactions, you also must face the fact that some methods are slower and costlier than others. For example, if you are selling something in a foreign country and you do it through a platform that’s not registered in that country, payment processing can take up to 3 times longer. Plus, there will be lots of extra fees to pay for the money to get through from one end to the other. Before implementing any new options, ask your target audience which method they would prefer to use. This will allow you to cater to them and attract them to your business.
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Avoid Redirecting Customers
While it may be convenient to use a third-party service for handling your transactions, some of them require you to redirect customers to another site to pay. Not only will this annoy people who thought they were at the end of the checkout procedure, but it also elongates the transaction process. The slower the servers the data has to go through are, the longer you and the customer have to wait for the transaction to be completed. Waiting too long for the payment confirmation may cause the customers to not use your business in the future. Plus, if customers have to finish the transaction at a third-party site, they will think of abandoning your business for someone else’s.
Learn How to Avoid Fraud
Naturally, one of the biggest headaches for every business owner is caused by credit card fraud. When fraud is discovered, you are expected to make a chargeback. While you may recover the value of your services, this is not the case with the processing fees. As a result of this, you lose money through chargebacks. In addition, being susceptible to fraud can make you seem less trustworthy in your customers’ eyes. Installing a multilayered security system can help you avoid this. This should entail two-factor authentication, IP address verification, CVV code requirements, and suspicious transaction notice.
Another fraud prevention tactic you may use is obtaining a high-risk merchant account. According to the merchant account details at payment savvy, creating a high-risk payment gateway is crucial in ensuring that your money is transferred quickly and securely. The transaction is processed through a more secure account, reducing the chance of malicious behavior. All this can help you verify your customers and prevent transactions made through stolen credit cards.
Keep Your System Up to Date
If you notice that your system has lately declined a large number of payments, you should analyze the circumstances. Did this happen when you had a larger number of visitors on your site? If it did, the root of the issue lies in your system and not in the way customers were trying to pay. Outdated systems often have problems recognizing newer credit cards or other payment methods. They may be unable to process the type of information provided or do it very slowly. Keep your system up to date and provide equal opportunity to all of your customers to pay. If your system is able to process transactions more efficiently, you will earn more revenue.
Help Customers Fix Eventual Mistakes
People often make mistakes when filling out payment forms, even without a complicated registration procedure. Failing to put in the correct address or email can easily get their transaction declined. This creates unnecessary data to process, and your clients can’t pay for your products or services. By setting up a system that recognizes potential errors in client forms, you can help people correct their mistakes before the data gets processed. Make sure you optimize this so that the error is easily visible. Having an alert appear in the field where the incorrect information is entered can help people see right away if there is any problem. Ideally, your system should save the correct details – so the customer doesn’t have to fill out the entire form again.
Don’t Let Customers Guess
Needless to say, the biggest improvement you can make in the efficacy of your system is at the checkout page. If you leave people guessing which steps they should do next, you are risking losing them at the most crucial stage of the checkout process. To make it more effortless for clients to pay and increase sales, you must take control of this process -or better yet, make them feel in control. The best way to do this is by placing a visible and specific call to actions button at the shopping cart. So when potential customers add something to their cart, they will have a clear choice between continuing shopping or proceeding with the checkout. Avoid ambiguous and hidden instructions for checkout, as these can turn people off.
Keep Advertisements Off From the Checkout Page
If you want customers to pay and to receive their money in a reasonable amount of time, it’s a good idea to keep distractions during the checkout to the minimum. And yes, this is true for advertisements as well. You may show customers a few recommended items they may also like. But you definitely don’t want to blind them with pop-up ads when they should be concentrating on finalizing the checkout process. The more distracted they are, the more likely they will make a mistake, and you may have a messy situation to sort out later. In addition, depending on the system you are using, your ads may slow down the entire procedure – simply because the system has to maintain them, as well. Not to mention how complicated things can get if your client is using an adblocker.
Allow Payments Without Registration
If there is one thing clients love more than a seamless registration process it is not having to register at all. They don’t have to remember another set of usernames and passwords and provide more data that can be stolen. While the option of registration is great to have for returning customers, you will have to gain the first. Complicated registration processes tend to put people off and slow down the transaction. If they have just come across your site and decided to buy one item, they may not understand why they should register to complete the payment. The first transaction after registration tends to be the slowest one of them all, as your system needs to process lots of new information about the customer. Without additional information to process, your system can work far more efficiently. You can still secure the transaction through other means which don’t rely on intrusive questions.
Don’t Ask for Too Much Information
When asking your customer to fill out the transaction form, you should only inquire about the information required for making a purchase. Remember, the goal is for the customers to have a more pleasant experience with your business. Making them answer unnecessary questions will not help with that. A smooth checkout process makes for a more efficient procedure, which, in turn, maximizes your bottom line. In case you need information such as a phone number for shipment and delivery, make sure to explain to the customer why you are asking for this.
Choose the Right Provider
Running a business takes a lot of effort and time, so it’s easy to understand why business owners are ready to hand over parts of its management. Handling money transactions is definitely a sector that needs to be managed by an experienced provider. That being said, the partner you are using for processing transactions can also determine the efficiency of your system. Apart from having the appropriate industry expertise and the tools to do it, your provider should also be able to provide customers with efficient payment processing. This will allow you to rely on them more as you will be confident that they can increase your sales.
Have a Consistent Design
One of the greatest advantages of consistent branding is becoming easily recognized by clients. If they see the same design, colors, and fonts all over again, they will soon begin to trust you as well. What many business owners fail to realize is the importance of applying this to their checkout page as well. Providers may offer you a ready-made checkout page, but it’s recommended that you keep this page tailored to the rest of your website. This gives you more control over the page, but there is one more important reason for doing this. When browsing your site, a client becomes familiar with its design. They proceed to the checkout page, and they are suddenly confronted with a design that looks nothing like your website. Considering the number of scams happening on a daily basis, the client may get discouraged from using that different-looking site. Keeping your branding consistent on the checkout page too helps instill confidence in new customers and maintain the old ones.
Showcase Your Security and Privacy Policies
What better way to entice customers to use your services than by showing them the security and privacy measures you apply? It’s natural for people to feel apprehensive about paying on a website they have never visited beforehand. Many of them even tend to abandon their carts due to the overwhelming concerns about transaction security. While avoiding redirections and design changes can help them feel more secure, sometimes it will be necessary to reassure them through other means. An SSL certificate is a useful tool for securing your clients’ credit card and personal information. Credit card companies may require you to adhere to PCI Security Standards Council standards. Even if they don’t, it’s a good idea to do it anyway as the council can help you manage credit card data.
Make sure to display the SSL and PCI certificates in a clearly visible place on your website. Doing this can also be an excellent method for discouraging malicious behavior and improving the efficiency of your transaction processing system. By displaying all the security measures you have in place, you are showing that you are able to catch scammers, and they should avoid your page. This will help you avoid many headaches, not to mention the loss of time and money.
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By following these tips, you can improve the efficiency of your payments, which will come with a couple of benefits. For one, you will gain a faster and more secure system that will save you time and money. Your customers will also find this payment system much more satisfactory. Easy and reliable checkout methods will entice more of them to make that final step in their purchase. This will increase your sales, and your company will gain more profit. For all these reasons, it’s always a good idea to look into several methods you can implement until you find the one that works the best for your company.
