Your Payment Gateway Impacts Your Customers’ Buying Experience.

Provide a good user experience and customers are more likely to make a purchase. Provide an excellent and seamless buying experience, and you will have customers coming back for more. A bad buying experience would never bring them back. A clean interface, easy-to-use navigation, comprehensive site search features, and a good quality UX (User Experience), among other features can be added to your site to provide a good user experience.

Additionally, your choice of payment gateway for your eCommerce store buying transactions can impact the shopping experience. It is critically important to create a great experience for users, right from the beginning to the end. Take advantage of a usability test with a free card sorting tool and avoid any factors that might detract from a great user experience, putting you at a high risk of losing shoppers.

Here’s how you can Improve UX design to make the most of your Payment Gateway:

1. Familiar elements for trust building

Customers, especially first timers, do sometimes have second thoughts when they get to the payment part of their order. They start wondering if they really need what they are considering buying. Some even wonder if it is safe to share their personal information and purchase the product online. They are more likely to abandon their shopping cart if there is no doubt in their minds or no weird feelings the product and transaction. This includes not being able to recognize the payment method or unable to see familiar trust logos.

Calm customer nerves by:

Selecting familiar logos for payment methods across all payment platforms, including MasterCard, Visa, and American Express
Displaying security logos or using a specific SSL certificate and explain what they are by using language like “Data Protection Guaranteed by Visa” or something similar.
If your payment gateway forces you to take your customers offsite for payment, let customers know at the point where they will be leaving your website. Display a message like, “You will be redirected to our Payment Provider and then brought back to our website for the final step” OR something similar.

2. Sending shoppers offsite may create poor experience

Make sure you consider the efficiency of the payment gateway when selecting the right one for your business. Try to determine if it is integrated via an API or hosted. With a hosted gateway, you’re taking away potential customers from your store. By doing so, you are asking them to share payment details outside your network, which could result in a bad experience.

However, there’s a flip side to it too. Moving them to a very popular hosted payment gateway may help develop trust. If you plan to sell products internationally, you may want to know which countries trust offsite and onsite payment gateways.

Consider whether your checkout flow can create trust among shoppers. They’re far more likely to back out for security reasons if the payment gateway isn’t credible.

The experience provided by your payment gateway should mirror that of your online store. Your checkout should be seamless and provide a pleasant experience for customers. The trust that customers have in your product may be eroded by any bad experiences they have at your payment gateway.

3. Multiple screens may distract shoppers

If shoppers are in a hurry, they are more likely to get annoyed if they have to click through multiple pages. It is here that a single page can benefit. It means that a shopper in a hurry can quickly browse through the page, without having to shuffle through pages or screens.

By offering them a payment method with multiple screens and too many clicks, you are sending that potential customer away and losing any chances of getting them back.

It is critically important to consider the checkout process and think if it is slowing down your customers. How much effort do potential customers have to put forth to spend their money on making a purchase in your store?

Remember, some shoppers have a low tolerance for error messages, especially during the checkout process. You cannot bring them back once they’re gone. It would help to double-check your gateway’s settings, including address validation, so you’re sure how customers would find the checkout process.

You may want to consider other special requests that you might make during the process, which could impact customer experience. This includes registration. Should it be a compulsion for visitors to sign up to make a purchase? Making sign up easier and simple could help retain potential shoppers, while more complicated steps or lengthy sign up process could draw them away.

Bottom Line

All in all, you should focus on improving customer experience beyond the cart. While your focus is on improving shopper experience, do not restrict yourself to the shopping cart. Checkout is a perplexing issue and you would do well by minimizing complexities and streamlining things to create a seamless user experience. For more information on how to improve customer experience, see iPerceptions right here.

With the Holiday Season right around the corner, don’t forget to “Check Your Credit Card Processing Rates Before The Holidays.”

Contact Us for more information on Credit Card Processing, or eChecks and ACH Transactions. Or take us up on our FREE Merchant Account Analysis offer. We’ll analyze your merchant account rates and let you know how to Save! If you are ready, you may be able to Switch and Save!

Your Payment Gateway Impacts Your Customers’ Buying Experience.