Drive Conversion with Frictionless Payments

Let's face it. People hate paying for stuff. It doesn't matter how much they love your product or how badly they need your service. When it comes time to exchange money and complete a transaction, people get nervous. This is precisely why you should do everything in your power to eliminate the friction associated with completing a purchase. While you can’t completely eliminate that initial trepidation or doubt, you can make the payment process as smooth as possible for your customers by minimizing the number of steps between them and checkout success.

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Offering the right payment options for your customer base is critical

The friction that keeps customers from completing their transactions directly correlates to how many payment options you support. The more payment options your site or app supports, the higher the conversion rate will be. Simply put, if a customer is given more ways of paying for an order, you remove obstacles and make it easier to complete the purchase.

It’s important to remember that customers often don't have the right payment option for what they want to buy. For example:

• Maybe they're worried about going over their limit if they use their credit card
• Maybe they don’t qualify for a credit card
• Maybe they don’t have a credit or debit card since they’ve just graduated college

Converting customers is hard enough, so don't make payments harder for them with too few options or a clunky checkout flow. The customer is already putting on their "buyer's hat" to buy from you, and that makes them far more likely to purchase than if they were simply browsing your site.

If you want to increase conversions from checkout form-fillers to actual buyers, here are some tips:

• Offer multiple payment options. If a customer can't use the method they prefer, it's unlikely that they'll stay on your site long enough for anything else about your product or service to impress them enough for them to return later. With this in mind, it's best if you offer at least one major credit card type (Visa/MasterCard/American Express), along with PayPal and Apple Pay as standard offerings.
• Offer alternative payment options. 50% of Gen Z and Millennials habitually make purchases online using cash or a cash replacement, and 49.7% of millennials and 53% of eligible Gen Z consumers don’t own a credit card¹. To cater to Millennial and Gen Z customers, consider offering alternative payment options, like Zage, which allows customers to pay in 1-click from their bank account and earn gamified rewards.
• Make sure these methods are easy-to-find throughout the checkout process; otherwise many potential customers may become frustrated enough by their inability to get through successfully that they give up altogether rather than try again later on another occasion (or worse yet never come back).

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Conclusion

Now that we’ve established the importance of making payments frictionless and convenient, we want to make sure you know how. Here’s a quick summary of what makes for a good payment flow:

• Offer choice. The more choices you offer customers when it comes time for checkout (and thus conversion), the better off both parties will be!
• Make sure that alternative payment options are included as part of the normal checkout flow - they should be easy to find.
• Make sure you optimize the payment experience for mobile devices!

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Want to learn more? Contact Zage today!

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Sources:

1. MyBank Tracker