Episode 002: Optimizing Your Website's Payment Options

 

Episode Summary: 

The payment options you offer customers at checkout can increase the rate of completing the sale or drive customers away. In this episode, Julie discusses the major payment options available and how to decide which ones belong on your website.

 

Episode Links:

https://www.paypal.com/ https://pay.amazon.com/us/  https://www.apple.com/apple-pay/  https://pay.google.com/  https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod     

Episode Transcript:

Announcer
Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well you're in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.

Julie Feickert
Hello, welcome to episode two of the Savvy Business Method Podcast. Where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Before we start today I just wanted to let you know that you can find links to resources I talk about here in the show in the show notes along with the transcript of the show. I realize that sometimes when you're listening to podcasts you may not have the option of quickly writing something down. And so those show notes are there so you can scan back through them and grab the information you need at a later time.

Now today's topic is optimizing your website's payment options. Because getting paid is really important, right. Like none of us have businesses, or at least not business for very long unless we're getting paid and paid consistently. So maybe you're in the process of setting up a website and you're starting to think about what payment options you want to offer. Or maybe you're in a position where you have a website currently but you might not have put a lot of thought into the payment options that you have available for your customers. Today I really want to dive into how you evaluate different payment options for your specific customers and there can be a lot of moving pieces here so I want to just go through systematically and talk about what's important to consider and how we can make the checkout experience as smooth as possible for our customers.

Now really, we could go about this two ways today. I could just tell you what I have setup on my own websites and that you should just use the same providers. But that would be doing you a great disservice. My goal with this podcast is always going to be to give you information so that you can make the best decision for your specific situation. I mean, shoot, I have two websites and I actually have different payment providers for the different websites. So even between my situations I have differences. And so I'm going to assume that you've got some unique things going on too that need to be considered. Also, let's get real for a minute, options change right. The providers that are popular today might not be popular tomorrow or might not be around in two years. And so you really do need the information so that you can make ongoing solid decisions for your business.

Okay, so let's start by talking about why does this even matter. If you've had a website for a while, you've probably figured out that only a small percentage of your website visitors actually add anything to their shopping cart, right. And then only a small percentage of those people ever check out. Generally speaking, on an eCommerce website, you're gonna see a conversion rate and that's the number of people who actually buy something ... that number is probably going to be between point five percent, so half a percent up to maybe around five percent. That is not very much, right. Even five percent isn't very much and that would be a dream for so many eCommerce sites. This number is dependent on so many factors. It can be the industry that you're in. It could the specific website or products, you know maybe you have products that are an impulse purchase so you're conversion rate's gonna be higher. The eCommerce site I currently have ... people going to that site generally take many weeks and sometimes months before they make a decision because they need to know that this product is the right fit.

So that rate of people checking out can vary all over the place. And there's a whole bunch of factors there that you can't control. But today we want to talk about some of the factors you can control because you really can't afford to have anybody getting lost in the shuffle, right. Especially when you're first starting out your website. Every single sale is so critically important. So how can we use payment options on our website to encourage more people to check out? And the key here is making it easy and having something for everyone. So let's start by talking about the most common way that people pay for things online, credit cards. Now I occasionally will see business owners on some of the forums or some of the Facebook groups and things arguing about whether or not they really need to take credit cards on their website.

Generally the argument goes, well if I have something like PayPal, so many people have PayPal accounts anyway, why can't I just use PayPal instead of offering say PayPal and a credit card option. So let's stop and think for a moment what our goal is with our check out page. By the time someone gets an item in their cart, right, where a small percentage of our visitors are getting an item in our cart. And then they hit that checkout button and now they're on the checkout page. You're only goal, once they get to the checkout page is for them to click the place order button. You want every single thing during the checkout process to be as slick as humanly possible. Think about like applying Vaseline all over your checkout, right. Nice and slick we want people going all the way to the end and clicking that place order button. So that's what's important here.

So when we think about payment options and you think about someone entering their information and getting down to the payment options, and just think about yourself, when you're shopping online. You get to the payment options and there's no credit card option. This is a red flag for people who shop online and here's the really interesting thing, they may not even realize it's a red flag. People know what it's like to shop online at this point right. Your visitors to your website are not unique to the online shopping experience. They probably have already been to Amazon today. They're used to seeing certain things in a checkout. They're used to putting in their billing address and their shipping address and selecting their shipping options and then putting in their payment information. And so if we have things about our checkout that vary from the norm, we are putting up a distraction, a red flag, something that is sending a signal to our customer that they need to pause for a moment and question whether or not this is a legitimate website, whether it's safe to put their information in, and these are absolutely not questions we want our customers asking during checkout, right. We want full trust so they hit that place order button.

So even if they are the type of person who would have used PayPal anyway, you've just given them a massive red flag by not having a credit card option available. So no question having a credit card payment option available on your website and one that is easy to use and looks like every other website on the internet, right, so they enter their credit card right there on your website. This is really important to credibility for your site. And I get it, credit cards are a pain in many ways for small business owners. There are issues with fees, fraud issues, charge back issues, but I am here to tell you that all of the issues that exist with credit cards are things that you as a business owner can learn to manage and to mitigate so that you can accept credit cards with confidence.

Okay, so moving on. Now that you're accepting credit cards on your website or hopefully I've convinced you that you are doing the right thing by doing so, let's talk about other payment systems. So going back to our discussion a few minutes ago about people putting stuff in their shopping carts and then not checking out. This is what's known as an abandoned cart rate. These are the people who put something in and then they leave your site for whatever reason. Now the abandoned cart rate on a standard eCommerce site is going to be somewhere around 75%. Ouch, right. Like that is ridiculous. If we could get our abandoned cart rate down we would have a lot fewer problems as website owners. And no question there are many reasons why people abandon their shopping cart. But let's talk about one way with our payment options that we have the ability to take that abandoned cart number down even further.

Let me tell you a little story. It's eight pm. The kids are finally in bed and you're exhausted after a long day. So you grab a glass of wine and your tablet and you can finally look for that pair of shoes to match your dress. And you find them and they're perfect. So you add them to your shopping cart, you start checking out and bam, they want your credit card number. Seriously, you just sat down. You don't want to get up and get your wallet. Argh. You'll just order them tomorrow. So you close the window and abandon your cart. And the next day, you forget to go back and buy the shoes. Sound familiar? I've done it, you've done it, and I can assure you your customers are doing it everyday. This is why you need what I like to call an I don't want to get off the couch payment option on your website. This is a payment option that does not require someone to have their credit card in hand in order to check out. And the most common one's currently are PayPal, Amazon Payments, Google Pay and Apple Pay.

So one question I often get from small business owners is whether or not anybody actually uses these. So you have a credit card option, I mean really, how many people are really going to use PayPal or Amazon Checkout or any of these. And in my experience with my websites as well as talking with other entrepreneurs, it's generally about half and half. So about half the people will use credit cards to check out and about half the people will use a combination of the other options available on your website. Or more specifically I see currently about 40-50% credit card and then maybe 30% Amazon and 30% PayPal on my eCommerce site. But this then leads to another question, right. How do you choose, or are you supposed to have lots of alternative payment options. Should a website have PayPal and Amazon and Apple Pay and Google Pay.

So here is my general rule of thumb. You generally need at least one and preferably two alternative payment systems. You should always prioritize the payment systems that have the most customers currently and right now that's PayPal and Amazon Payments. Thanks to the popularity of the Amazon Prime program, a ton of people have Amazon accounts. And of course PayPal has been around for years and was the only real significant player in the industry for so long that lots of people have PayPal accounts. I can definitely see Apple Pay and Google Pay gaining momentum over the years. But right now I would say that PayPal and Amazon are must haves for most eCommerce websites.

So what would be the argument though against having all four available. And the biggest thing I would be concerned about is whether having three or four options makes your checkout look cluttered. You know there's always that risk when we give customers lots of options that we introduce indecision, right, into the decision making process. And so instead of just clicking something quickly, they stop and say, well wait, I could use this one or I could use this one or oh yeah, I meant to sign up for an Apple Pay account, maybe I should do that right now. So sometimes having less options are usually enough. As a website owner it's actually a better situation.

So hopefully this discussion today was helpful as you start thinking through how you can best setup the payment options on your checkout to ensure as many of your customers as possible press that final place order button. Thanks so much for joining me today, I hope you had as much fun as I did. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows I would love to hear them. You can find me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com or on Facebook and YouTube. Also please be sure to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher so you don't miss an episode. And of course, I would greatly appreciate if you could rate and review this podcast in iTunes because it really does help other people find it.

Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Announcer
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date, visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.

 

Episode 002: Optimizing Your Website's Payment Options