Completing the payment is a key moment of the purchasing process in online shopping. Delivering the right experience can help you boost sales, while neglecting this aspect of your shop might turn users away. There are many payment solutions and providers out there that can improve your order procedure - and you need to choose the ones that will be best for your business. Here’s how.
There are multiple selection criteria to take into consideration. The most important ones are:
- Costs and interest,
- Diversity of payment methods,
- Availability,
- The right fit for your user group,
- Top UX design,
- Recurring payment options,
- Third party integrations.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these, to establish the characteristics of a good online payment solution.
Payment interest and costs
It won’t surprise you that the lower the interest or fee you have to pay to your payment solution provider, the better for you. Make sure to check thoroughly for hidden costs. It’s especially important that you fully understand the agreement you sign.
Diversity of payment options
Users have various preferences, and providing them with options can be a great way to make them happy. Think carefully about which of the following make sense for your business:
- quick bank transfer - integrated with various banks, at least the ones most popular among your user base,
- card payments,
- Apple Pay and Google Pay,
- buy-now-pay-later (think Klarna model),
- cryptocurrencies.
These are not the only options out there - depending on your market, you might need to consider some more unique choices.
Availability
Your payment solution needs to be able to handle payments from the markets you are targeting. This is especially important (and complicated) for companies offering world-wide sales. Remember that you will have to provide proper translation and market customization. The payment provider should be able to display their user interface in the language of your target consumer, and their form fields must be properly labeled based on the user’s location. For example, not every country has “states”. Some use other high-level administrative subdivisions, like lands in Germany, voivodeships in Poland, or prefectures in Japan. Improper labeling can confuse your clients - which increases the risk that they will withdraw their order.
More generally, you will need to provide a high availability of service. The 3rd party payments provider should be able to guarantee an almost continuously service. Make sure the SLA agreement you sign defines the maximum downtime or minimal availability as a percentage of the total availability.
Finally, consider the usability of the payment solution interface on mobile platforms. Many shopping decisions nowadays are made while the user interacts with their mobile device, so make sure your clients can finalize their payments using the device they have on hand.
The right fit for your user group
To earn your users’ trust, you need to learn their habits. Users often have certain preferences when it comes to payment providers, which are a result of their previous online behaviours. Some users will base their preference on reputation and brand, others will choose providers due to their “buyer’s panel”, where they can monitor their online spending, manage subscriptions, and so on. Find out what’s important to your users and deliver on that.
UX quality for the payment finalization process
The payment finalization process is one of the most important stages of making a purchase. And the quality of the UX delivered by the payment provider at this stage has a direct impact on your sales figures. You want to ensure that your customers are confronted with an easy to use, navigable interface and process. Users shouldn’t be burdened with unnecessary decisions and forced to provide unnecessary information. They should be able to complete their payment quickly and efficiently.
Payment providers need to be able to handle any payment error while ensuring a positive experience. Features such as the option to retry the transaction, or to enter details of another credit card, can be a big help. Bonus points if the payment provider can notify the client about discarded payment processes. For example, if the user was forced to leave the page and never had the chance to complete the payment, they should be notified of this within a certain amount of time, and given a link to the finalization page of that payment.
Recurring payments
If you use a monthly subscription model, for example, charging your users once per a set payment period, make sure that your payment provider does support such an operation. And pay attention to crucial UX elements related to such a system. Users may forget to charge their debit cards, want to cancel their subscription, or some of their information may become outdated - your payment system needs to be ready for all such cases.
Third party integrations
Finally, an integration with your e-commerce platform - or at least the option to develop such an integration yourself - is incredibly important for your business. If there are no available integrations for the payment solution you want to use, a team of experts can develop one for you. The investment in a custom-made integration is usually quickly made irrelevant by the savings you make on lowered operational costs.
Need a team to advise you, or build a custom payment solution integration for your online business?
