We’ve all been there. The page takes ages to load, you’re redirected to three other websites and you can’t work out the next step to finalising your purchase. A complicated payment process can kill a sale and encourage shoppers to spend elsewhere. What do these complications look like? Well, it could be anything from re-entering your personal information multiple times, a long wait, or being made to create an account. Research has found that 55% of people will abandon their basket at checkout if they’re made to re-enter information, demonstrating the value of making payments simple. From my experience working at PagoNxt Merchant Solutions, there are many ways to make payments simple. Here, I share my top four tips.

Provide a variety of payment methods

One of the best ways to make payments simple is to facilitate and process payments via different methods. Doing so will not only improve the customer experience, but for merchants it will increase the number of sales conversions and streamline internal processes to make receiving payments more simple. Adapting to different payment methods can pose a complex challenge at times, so making sure that you partner with a payments company and have the infrastructure in place to accept different payments, can save you a headache in the long term. At PagoNxt, we allow our partners to process payments via different methods, and Getnet offers merchants access to multi-channel, multi-method, and multi-country payments. Getnet has more than 1.4 million clients and processes €168 billion* in around four billion transactions per year. With the right payments partner, accepting payments via different methods can be key to simplifying payments and maximising sales.

Make errors easy to fix

Want to know an inevitable way to lose a sale? A payment error that can’t be fixed. When working with customers, sometimes a zip code is overlooked or someone forgets the ‘@’ in their email address. We all do it, right? However, when this happens, ensuring that errors are flagged and can be corrected swiftly is key to not losing the sale altogether. The ideal scenario is to have an error message appear in the field in which the error occurred. Having UX teams in charge of designing and testing the user experience is key to make payments more simple. This is not something that merchants from all sizes can do, but if you follow our blog we promise to make an special entrance of how to improve the digital experience at the checkout!

Don’t redirect people

You’re taking me where? When you have a customer visit your site, one of the worst things you can do is take someone elsewhere to pay or have their identity verified. Further, when you take a customer to a new site, they can feel concerned that they’re sharing their details with a third party or another business, sparking concerns around security. There are two problems here: the first being that by redirecting customers to another site, you minimise the chances that they will purchase more from your store, and second, if a customer is concerned about security, chances are, they will cancel the sale completely. Having a payments page on your website is key to simplifying the payment process, and generating sales.

Ask for essential information only

Taking lots of unnecessary data during the onboarding or checkout processes is another way that merchants and payment companies are making payments unnecessarily complex. When a customer is entering their data, only essential data should be entered. By doing this, merchants can reduce the speed of the conversion process, allay any customer fears around how their data will be used, and why a merchant needs such specific information. Adding a long list of fields to fill out adds more hurdles for people to jump over in order to pay. A report published by Forrester found that 11% of U.S. adults abandoned an online purchase because they either didn’t want to register or the site was asking for too much information. As such, simplifying the payment process as much as possible is in a merchants’ best interest, and failure to do so can lead to less sales and greater cart abandonment. At PagoNxt, we offer counsel to our partners on how payments can be made with less customer data, and merchants see great success as a result.

There are countless ways to simplify payments. Doing so will be key to maintaining or boosting the sales that a merchant generates. As consumers cling to their cash amid economic insecurity, cart abandonment rates may increase. As such, merchants around the world must do all that they can to maintain cash flow and continue to convert sales. Simplifying the payment process is key to this.

*Total Payment Volume in 2022

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