Welcome again to the DIY Ecommerce Guide from Tamebay and the latest of our fortnightly news-blasts about how to set up, run and grow an online retail business. While the next two parts of the book have been published and are ready to download – about mobilising your etail business and about how to sell through marketplaces – we continue our drill downs into Part 1: Getting Started.
This week we are looking at payments. Taking payments is the key to, literally, making money. If you can’t take payments, you can’t sell anything. While much attention is often paid to the design and functionality of the website (and quite rightly so), less is paid to how the checkout process works.
In the DIY Guide’s Part 1: Getting Started, there is a lot of information about how you set up payment gateways and how you ready your business and its attendant accounts for the money. Here, in the newsletter this week, we are adding to that with a look at why and how you need to focus on your checkout process.
The why is simple to address. According to research by payment provider Adyen, a third (32%) of online shoppers log off without buying anything because of payment difficulties. When asked why, 32% of customers cited lengthy payment processes as their number one reason. This was followed by the poor implementation of chosen payment method, (25%) and the lack of relevant payment options. The same is true for in-app payments, with customers citing payment options as the top reason for abandoning their baskets.
The how is less easy to put into practice. To stop shoppers leaving at the crucial part where money has to change hands is always going to be a challenge. When they aren’t face to face with you, many won’t hesitate to simply walk away.
Some will do this because they simply chicken out of paying. But for many others, the reason for leaving are a mixture of psychological and physical ones.
Baulking at the cost is the main one, psychologically speaking, while slow page loading between steps and having to type in loads of details are the main physical ones. There are others. And for each consumer, combinations of these factors all come to bear.
But there are techniques of design of the checkout that can overcome these and can, with a little thought and a small investment, generate significantly more sales.
And that is the thrust of today’s newsletter – and what we have been looking at for the past couple of weeks – how to beat online payment pain. Hopefully there are some useful tips and examples in here – but I am sure you have many of your own.
Of course, these are the basic steps to starting on your ecommerce journey. They rest of DIY Ecommerce Guide Part 1: Start includes all the really fun stuff – from setting up a checkout, to taking payments and beyond. In the next newsletter we shall look at the technology and tools to help bring together your idea, your web design and your payments to build the perfect ecommerce site.
In the meantime, do let us know what you think and more importantly what you need to learn. We can build this book together by taking on your problems and issues – and ideas – and adding them in to the mix. So we’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line at:
