This post is provided by Jason Dirkham.

If you want to improve the customer experience on your business website, then you need to look at how your customers are able to pay for their services. It’s not something most people consider, but the payment options you are giving your customers are going to make a difference to the experience your business gives them. Improving the customer experience should be of high concern to you, and payment methods that your customers use will inform whether they choose your business again – or not.

The merchant provider you pick for your website is going to be an important decision. So, make sure that you are helping your customers from the moment they visit the site. With this approach, you can improve the shopping experience and end up with fewer abandoned carts on your site along with higher overall sales. Your business is an important one, and these tips can help you to improve your customer’s experience of making payments on your website.

  • Get to know what abandoned carts mean. It’s so important that you choose to research abandoned carts. You need to know why customers are putting things into their cart and then walking away from it. Until you understand it, you can’t fix the problem.
  • Make sure that you’re offering different payment methods. If your website is only accepting PayPal, you’re very likely to turn customers away. The reason for this is because not everybody wants to pay by PayPal and not everybody has the ability to pay by PayPal. You are restricting people from being able to use your website effectively and that’s going to negatively geared towards your business failing.
  • Make sure that you make currency an option. Wherever you are based in the world, you should make sure that people can still pay in a range of currencies when they are buying from your website. Currency exchange is important if your business is looking to sell to an international client base. If your website displays products in the local currency, that’s great, but what about other currencies? You need to change your payment methods if you are accepting different currencies, because different countries have different options.
  • Give as many options as you can. Many websites will only accept a credit card payment, but if the credit card is declined, that’s a very big reason for a customer to abandon the sale and then not come back. You need to make sure that you are reducing that risk.  One of the biggest reasons a customer card has declined is because the card details are incorrect or incomplete. If you make sure that your payment technology is compatible across mobile and website devices, you can ensure that the checkout process works well enough that cards aren’t going to be automatically declined because somebody on the go has forgotten a number. 

If you want your own customers to love the way your website works, then you need to give them options when it comes to their payment methods. It’s the easiest way to retain them.