How to Optimize Your Online Payment Process for Higher Conversion Effectively

A lot of hard work and effort goes through in guiding site visitors throughout the entire customer journey. Therefore, knowing that the user reached the payment page after going through the right material can be a huge sigh of relief.

Unfortunately, according to an analysis from Statista, 88% of people who will reach the payment page will leave without making a payment. Therefore, you need to know the barriers to why prospects leave your site.

In this post, we’ve put together some of the best practices for enhancing the payment process for higher conversions:

1. Create customer trust with design and security features

Your customers want to know that their online payments on your site are secure. Placing visible signposts and design elements on your payment page will give shoppers the confidence to click the payment button. 

You can also place padlock symbols, a progress bar, and the logo of your trusted payment provider on the checkout page. You might also want to place security-influenced words that will reassure customers. 

Also, rather than using the term “Pay Now,” you might want to change it to “Pay Securely.” You need to protect your customers using secure payment systems. It will reinforce the fact that their payment is protected at every step. When you ease their fears around security, you can guide your customers to completing the transaction. 

2. Optimize for mobile payments

These days, a majority of transactions now happen on mobile devices. That’s why you must create a fully responsive design. Make sure that your payment page will automatically adapt to the size of the customers’ devices, whether they’re using smartphones, desktops, or tablets. 

You should also test your checkout for various screen sizes and touch interfaces. That way, you’ll know what it looks and feels like for your customers. 

3. Pre-fill the information at checkout

In the same way, you might also have collected information that you’ll need for the checkout page in the buying process. For instance, you may already have gathered the user’s address from the initial quote.

If this is the case, then you might want to use and pre-fill information at checkout. Your customers will appreciate it if they can save valuable seconds by pre-filling information at checkout.

4. Provide alternative payment options

Not all of your customers have a credit card, while others don’t always know how to use them on an online transaction. 

So, make sure that you provide alternative payment options that will suit your customers, like PayPal, ApplePay, and Direct Debit to boost your ecommerce conversions.

5. Offer a simple and seamless payment process

In the same way, most of your customers want a simple and seamless payment process. So, it’s your job to create a simple and user-friendly customer journey for them.

Also, to boost conversions, you must make the payment process easy. The easier it is, the higher your conversion rates.

Here are some tips:

• One-click payments: One-click payments are already used by retail giants like Amazon. It ensures that your customers will have more easy, one-click payments.
• A/B testing: You also need to perform A/B testing to know the most effective elements. When you present various versions of the same webpage to different customers, it will be easier to single out elements that will need tweaking or those that are effective and need to be integrated across the board. 

6. Leverage smart integrations

Do you know that businesses still record their sales in handwritten ledgers? It is prone to error, but it also leaves your business’ future entirely to chance. It will only take one spill from a cup of coffee or natural disasters like floods or fires for all of these sales records to vanish. 

Not to mention, it can lead to many mistakes, oversights, and inefficiency on your part. That’s why your online payment should integrate seamlessly with your other functions and manufacturing software to keep your payment process and business working like a well-oiled machine.

7. Create a simple and user-friendly journey

Ideally, users want a simple and user-friendly checkout experience from your site. Your payment page should be designed in a way that matches the rest of your site. You need to use the same logos, fonts, and colors to make your customers feel more comfortable purchasing from you.

Accessibility is also vital for visually impaired customers, such as those who have problems with their vision. People that are color blind have a hard time seeing red error messages or distinguishing more contrasting colors like red and green, blue and purple.

8. Provide intelligent interactions

When users progress in the checkout experience, guide them every step of the way so that they’ll know where they are and what’s expected of them. 

Give them clear steps with specific words, like, “how would you like to pay,” or “your card number is needed.” You should also ensure that your payment page has checkmarks after a step is done successfully. Doing so will give them the confidence to go through with the transaction. 

9. How is the user’s progress?

It’s also important to let users know how they’re progressing through the payment process. If they think that another page awaits them, they’ll abandon the whole process even if they could be wrong.

But when you add completion markers on the sections of the payment page, then you can show them how close they are to making the payment. You can also place a ‘percent completed’ marker or a visual bar that will show how many steps need to be done and how many more will remain.

In Summary

So, there you have it. We hope that you apply these tips to optimize your payment pages. You also need to know that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. The most important thing you need to do is keep on testing. You might want to test every element separately. 

Remember, even the most minor wins can eventually lead to a serious increase in revenue for your business.