Payscout offers merchants multiple payment options
Payment options are not optional. We are all customers. We are all buyers. Have you ever been in a store or looking at an online checkout page only to find that you don’t have the right payment mechanism available to make the purchase – you didn’t have cash or a check in a place that doesn’t take credit cards or that only take Pay Pal.
No matter what business you’re in, bet your bottom dollar that your customers and prospective customers want to be able to buy from you on their own terms. And we’re not talking about price terms here. People aren’t looking to set the price of the products and services you sell. Customers always expect to receive good value for their money and that isn’t going to change any time soon. But value isn’t a factor that makes a buying process convenient. It’s one of the reasons a person might decide to wait in a long line and pay with their last bit of cash in a cash-only store. It’s a reason that someone might go through a multi-page, multi-step checkout process on a website, to be able to use their preferred payment option. A convenient purchase, however, is about the steps involved between the point at which a customer decides to make the purchase and the point at which the purchase is actually made and confirmed.
If you’re company isn’t actively trying to make it convenient for your customers to be buyers, you can place another bet…this time you can bet that for every one person who does persist and put up with a less than accommodating payment system, there are plenty more who will simply walk or navigate away, perhaps never to return.
One of the reasons so many prospective customers remain “prospects”, why so many people abandon their online shopping carts, is that most businesses managers don’t take the initiative to make the buying process as convenient as possible for their customers. Whether it’s limiting the number of steps involved in the process or expanding the payment options, if you want to boost your business, now is a good time to think about making your checkout process convenient for your customers.
Although this list of suggestions is by no means exhaustive, the following represent some of the ways in which you can go ahead and make your purchase process all the more convenient for your customers:
1. Make sure you offer multiple payment options.Brick and mortar companies should offer cash, check, credit card, and debit cards (MasterCard and Visa). Online companies should offer at least credit card and debit card options but it doesn’t hurt to investigate other payment systems such as e-Checks and the like.
2. Offer a guest checkout option A recent craze for online businesses seems to be the use of the required registration. Sure, the advantage of this system is that you get contact information. The bad news is that plenty of people are annoyed by having to fill out an extra form and register. Although you should definitely offer registration with your site as an option (it would be a mistake not to have that as an option) don’t make it a requirement.
3. Limit the time required to make a purchase. This rule applies to both brick and mortar and online establishments. Keeping your customer waiting while you process payment or work through paperwork has never proved a winning strategy. Make sure that there are only a couple of steps involved in the purchase process so that your customer can be on their way in a matter of a couple of minutes, no more, once they have entered the checkout phase.
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