I don’t often open a new eBay account, I’ve got more than enough to last me a life time, both business seller accounts and personal eBay accounts, but this week I had need of just one more. It’s always interesting to see things from a new eBay user’s perspective and as a buyer it’s a pretty simple process.
One thing that I’ve not seen before although I’ve been vaguely aware of is that you can choose to pay with PayPal before opening a PayPal account. You can simply opt to pay for your eBay purchase by credit or debit card and it’ll be processed by PayPal and your purchase completed.
I like this, anything making it simple for new buyers to complete their purchase is good news and throwing up obstacles at checkout is one sure fire way to increase the likelihood of an abandoned shopping cart. Giving new buyers a quick and simple way to pay makes perfect sense.
What payment options do you offer on your own website? These days even if PayPal is all you use there’s no excuse for not opening up a business account with PayPal and accepting cards with PayPal website payments, and for small retailers it’s free bar the normal PayPal fees. Choice is key, give customers easy options to pay and your abandoned shopping carts should decrease.
One Response
This has been around for some time however I feel it could be clearer, my mum uses the function and thinks its great, I did try and explain the difference between paypal and ebay when she was trying to sign into paypal with her ebay userID but gave up after about half an hour.
I only wish it was clearer for customers to use, we still get calls on a regular basis asking to pay over the phone when this system is quick and easy.