When you choose a payment processor there are a lot of things that come to mind. While different businesses have different reasons for which payment processor they choose, some of the most common factors businesses consider when choosing a payment processor are:
- More security for their business
- More security for paying customers
- More payment options for potential buyers
- More control over payments they receive
The question, however, is does it all end once you have a payment processor?
Even if you’re using the best payment processor on earth, that doesn’t guarantee more sales or business for you; you need to constantly market yourself and drive quality traffic that converts to customers.
Unfortunately, driving traffic or starting a massive marketing campaign won’t help that much if you’re making some of the most common mistakes people make when it comes to receiving payments.
Here are 5 tweaks every merchant can make to their payment system that will guarantee significantly more sales.
1. Give potential customers more payment options
As an online merchant, one of the best payment tweaks you can make to get a lot more sales is to give potential customers more payment options; as long as the risk isn’t too much for you, which shouldn’t be a problem if you use the right payment processing service, it’s critical that you give potential customers as much payment options as possible.
According to data from Bank Card SD, around 80% of American Express, Visa card and MasterCard holders agree that regardless of the business nature, merchants should offer potential customers as much payment options as possible.
To put things in perspective, there are currently a little over 120 million active Paypal users but over 800 million consumers have shopped online and 90% of all internet sales are made with credit cards.
In other words, if you’re a business that restricts yourself to just Paypal you’ll be limiting yourself just to around 10% of internet shoppers who have a Paypal account. You’ll be missing sales from those who don’t, and in this case it’s very significant.
By including an option to securely accept credit card payments, however, you can double or even triple the number of sales that come in from your website.
If you’re only using Paypal or a service that significantly restricts who can pay you, it’s critical that you start using a payment processor that also allows you to accept credit cards without having to rely on a third-party such as Paypal.
2. Implement more security and assurance techniques
Credit card and debit card fraud, especially online, is the number 1 fear of Americans in the midst of the global financial crisis according to data from Unisys Security Index.
Also, recent data has shown that 40% of all frauds relate to credit cards and 60% of credit card frauds occur online.
In other words, more than ever, people are becoming very careful when it comes to making payments online and a lot of people are afraid of providing their credit card details to any website they don’t trust. Unfortunately, this could be your website.
A great way to boost sales on your website is by having various seals and logos on your website that prove the validity and security of your website; this could be an SSL secured seal, a Visa and MasterCard Secured logo or a BBB logo. Even better, if you’re using a reliable payment processor you can indicate on your website so that people know that their payments are being processed securely thanks to your payment processor.
If you can help people overcome their fears of being a victim of credit card fraud by using your website, you can significantly increase the sales that come in as a result.
3. Experiment with reducing the number of payment fields you require
This particular tweak is very important, yet very few people pay attention to it.
When it comes to accepting and processing credit card details on your website, it’s natural to ask for more details so as to prevent fraudsters from using your website. At the same time, this might be costing you a lot of sales from legitimate customers.
When you require too much details, even legitimate customers will abandon your website since they don’t have the time to waste filling all that form; this can become even worse when the encounter a confusing field.
By reducing the number of payment fields potential customers have to fill, however, you’ll be able to increase sales on your website significantly.
A great example of a company that did this to great effect is Expedia; just by removing a “company” field that requires users to fill in details of their company, Expedia was able to get $12 million more in annual revenue. That’s how much having the wrong fields, or too many fields, could be costing your business!
4. Experiment with your payment call to actions
When people land on your website, click on the payment button and start filling their credit card details, it means they have decided to buy, right? Well, no.
According to this conversion optimization study from ContentVerve, a business was able to increase sales by 31.03% just by changing the button people have to click to authorize their credit card information; a similar change resulted in a 10% decrease.
What this shows is that even when people have filled in the required details on your credit card form, they’re still not customers. You can increase more sales by constantly tweaking various aspects of your payment form, especially the payment button.
5. Start building an email list that contain the details of paying customers
Marketing is expensive and, if you’re a small business, you probably don’t have the budget to compete with all the big companies who want the same customer as you.
In a situation like this, the best tweak you can make to your payment system is to capitalize on existing customers; drive them into a funnel, keep in touch with them and make offers to them in the future.
In other words, start building an email list that contains email addresses and names of paying subscribers who would like to receive more info from you. Not only will they have more value since they’ve already used and are familiar with your brand but, because they’ve purchased from you before, you can be sure they are real customers who will buy from you. Not freeloaders.
For this to work, though, it’s important to avoid going the spam lane; it’s illegal to add customers to a mailing list just because they’re customers. They have to be aware of it and also agree to receive mailings from you, so make sure you let customers choose whether they want to receive emails from you or not after making a purchase.
