6 May 2021
For marketplaces, optimising their payment page is essential to increase their conversion rate. Your payment page needs to be simple, fast and secure to achieve an optimal conversion rate. Discover our best practices for a payment page that converts.
Keep in mind that as long as your customers have not pressed the “pay” button, they can change their minds. The process of buying online is very different from interacting with a real person. Buyers are alone with their purchasing decision and have no one to reassure them about their doubts about the quality of the product or service, the delivery or even the seller’s existence.
A simple, consistent and smooth sales process is reassuring. If your payment journey takes several pages or is slower or longer because you are redirecting the buyer to your payment provider’s site, these are all opportunities for your customer to change their mind and abandon their purchase.
This is why it is important to favour, as far as possible, a single payment page that is in keeping with your site. If you can’t avoid redirection, some providers, such as Lemonway, offer pages that can be fully customised or integrated into your site. This makes it completely transparent to the user, who remains in your world and is less likely to change their mind.
In payment forms, ask only for essential data to complete the transaction. Unnecessary fields make your form unwieldy and may discourage your buyer.
A Baymard Institute study in the US shows that 35% of customers abandon their shopping cart when asked to create an account before proceeding to payment. Create an account with the information required for any order: name, address, email and telephone number. All you have to do is add a “password” field, and the account will be created automatically.
Furthermore, if you offer your customers the opportunity to create an account, simplify the act of buying for them by pre-filling in the fields you already know. Offering to save their payment information is also a good way to shorten the purchasing process, especially for small, recurring purchases such as office supplies, which can be done with one click.
If you want your customers to complete their purchase process, you have to do everything you can to encourage them to do so. The online offer is usually very large, so unless you are the only one offering your products or services, Internet users are not prepared to make an effort to buy them from you.
The payment procedure should therefore be as straightforward and standard as possible. One way to do this is to include a progress bar at the top of each page. The customer can see at a glance what steps they have to take to complete their purchase and what stage they have reached.
In addition, at each stage, the instructions and CTA (call to action) must be clear, visible and intelligible. This may seem obvious, but often, in an effort to editorialise the less sexy pages of the site, we can make them confusing. Play with the aesthetics, but don’t touch the “Pay” button.
Think Mobile First; your payment page display must be optimal, regardless of the type of device (desktop, mobile tablet). There are also ways to make it easier to pay by card on the move, including wallet offerings such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, or the ability to take a picture of your credit/debit card instead of typing in the numbers.
According to the study cited above, 20% of visitors abandon their shopping cart because they are not confident enough to leave their payment information. Indeed, leaving one’s bank card number is not a trivial act, especially when making a first purchase.
Here too, clear information is key. To reassure your buyers, here is some information you can put forward on the security of the payment:
Your buyers will also be reassured if they can use their favourite payment method. Habits vary, according to whether you are a B2B or B2C marketplace or a C2C platform. And this is even more true if you sell internationally. Take the time to find out about your customers’ payment preferences: payment by card, SEPA direct debit, bank transfer or even alternative payment methods such as iDeal or Bancontact, depending on the location of your platform.
As you can see, payment is a key element in the conversion rate of your marketplace. At Lemonway, we offer a multitude of services to tailor your payment platform to your customers’ needs securely . Would you like to know more? Please contact us!
