What Makes An Ideal Checkout Scenario?
A version of this article was originally published in The Paypers.
The checkout process is an integral part of the user experience. Make it too complicated and you risk your customers giving up, make it too simple and you risk rousing their suspicion. Based on our experience as a leading payment orchestration platform, we have collected some of the biggest turnoffs for customers at checkout, and what merchants can do to deliver a seamless experience that improves conversion rates.
Forced account creation: Don’t insist that your customers create an account in order to complete their purchase. Allow for guest checkout, delivering a quick checkout experience.
Hidden charges: Don’t sneak in additional costs (taxes, shipping etc.). Do provide all fees and charges upfront so that customers knows exactly how much they will be charged.
Payment methods: Don’t expect all consumers to pay the same way. Do provide payment methods relevant to your markets and core target group.
Complex and confusing process: Don’t make it too complicated. Do keep it simple. Provide a quick and seamless checkout experience and reduce the likelihood that your customers will give up and buy elsewhere.
Security: Don’t underestimate the customer. Do provide reassurance when they are entering billing, shipping, and personal information. Display security badges when possible and offer a secure checkout experience as part of your shop. Customers are also more likely to feel secure if you provide them with a payment method they are comfortable with.
Device Optimization: Don’t expect one checkout experience to work across all devices. Do create optimal checkout scenarios for desktop, mobile, apps and so on.
What can merchants do to address this on a practical level?
Offer the right payment methods to your consumers. It is best practice for merchants to provide a choice of online payment options to encourage customers to complete their purchase and increase sales. Every market has its own preferred methods, and demographics within it that have their own preferences.
How can merchants easily provide multiple payment options?
An effective way to provide your customers with multiple payment options is by using a payment orchestration platform. A payment orchestration or payment management platform connects merchants to various payments service providers (PSPs) and acquirers offering a range of payment methods such as credit cards and alternative payment methods (APMs). These connections are all managed from a single platform using a single API. Of course, merchants do not need to use a payment orchestration platform. They can integrate payment service providers or acquirers directly. However, choosing this route can hamper the merchant's ability to expand and is far less flexible, while making the merchant far more dependent on the payment provider. As a company grows, adding more products and expanding into new markets, it needs to provide a checkout experiences that matches their products and market expectations.
Give your customers security
It is very off-putting for customers to be sent to a different page without any company branding and with no tangible link to the merchant when it is time to pay. It is not uncommon for them to get cold feet when faced with such a scenario. You can reassure your customers by creating branded checkout forms. For example, IXOPAY's Frontend Application Server Technology (FAST) makes it easy to create and publish branded and optimized payment pages. You can combine HTML and CSS with popular programming languages such as JavaScript and PHP, creating a seamless shopping experience that visually matches the design of the rest of your site, boosting consumer confidence and improving conversion rates.
Tailor the checkout experience with dynamic method selection
Providing customers with local payment methods (e.g. SOFORT in German-speaking countries, iDEAL in the Netherlands, BACS in the UK) is essential to delivering a smooth checkout experience. Using a payment orchestration platform like IXOPAY, you can create flexible and dynamic checkout pages that only display the most suitable payment methods for an individual customer.
You also have a flexible range of options for configuring which payment methods are available for customers to select from. In addition to offering regional payment methods based on the customer’s location, you can also block specific payment methods (e.g. credit cards) for customers with a high-risk profile – in these circumstances you may want to offer a payment method without a chargeback option.
Recurring customers
Make it easier for customers to make repeat purchases by storing their payment instruments in a PCI-DSS vault. Return customer can then quickly complete payment without having to enter their payment details again. This gives them security and simplifies the checkout experience, allowing for instant purchases.
By consolidating your payment stack with a payment orchestration layer, you can offer your customers a consistent, secure and streamlined checkout experience. Make sure that your checkout experience is consistent across all devices. More and more consumers make purchases using smartphones and tablets, or via in-app purchases. Providing a custom-tailored experience for each of these scenarios helps increase conversion rates and gain loyal customers. IXOPAY providers enterprise merchants with all the tools necessary to offer consumers a seamless checkout experience. Find out what else a leading payment orchestration platform can do for your business.
About IXOPAY
IXOPAY is a payments orchestration platform enabling independent, flexible and global payment processing. As a highly scalable and PCI-DSS certified “fintech enabler”, IXOPAY fulfills the needs of large merchants as well as those of “white label” clients: payment service providers (PSPs), acquirers and independent sales organizations (ISOs). The modern, easily extendable architecture offers smart transaction routing & cascading, state-of-the-art risk & fraud management, fully automated reconciliation and settlements processing, comprehensive reporting as well as plugin-based integration of acquirers, payment service providers and alternative payment methods (APMs).
IXOPAY is part of the IXOLIT Group, founded in Vienna, Austria in 2001. With local entities in Austria and the USA, IXOLIT supports national and international customers across various industry verticals. The owner-led and -financed company has grown from 2 to more than 65 employees and is focused on building innovative solutions for eCommerce.
Please find more information about IXOPAY here: https://www.ixopay.com