The popularity of e-commerce has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. The number has grown even further during the pandemic. Data revealed that 30 percent of customers are now engaged in online shopping as part of safety and health protocols. Small businesses have also found themselves increasing their online offerings during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But even before the pandemic, a lot of customers had already been shopping online. In order to cater to online shoppers, your e-commerce business should consider adding digital platforms as a payment channel. As an online retailer, you could be asking yourself what you could gain from implementing digital payments for your e-commerce store.
While cash payments won’t be going away in the near future, the use of electronic payments is expected to increase to 83% by 2022. However, some e-commerce businesses consider online payment processing a challenge for them. 64% of US small businesses do not even have a website so accepting digital payments would really be difficult for them. In this article, we shall explore the benefits of accepting digital payments in your online store.
Benefits of Digital Payments
- Faster Transactions
- Reach More Customers
- Consistent Customer Experience
- Enhanced Transaction Security
- Increased Productivity
- Greater Flexibility
- Automated Process
- Reduced Cart Abandonment
Tips On Simplifying Digital Payments
- Create A Loyalty Program
- Shorten Payment Journey
- Use Mobile Payment Software
- Enhance Payment Interoperability
- Eliminate Redirects
Let’s discuss in detail.
Benefits of Digital Payments
Here are some of the reasons you should consider digital payments for your e-commerce store:
- Faster Transactions
No customer wants to wait during a slow or lengthy processing of orders. If your competitor offers a better experience, it is likely that you could lose customers to the competition. And with most online shoppers now looking for a fast and simple checkout process, ensuring faster order processing will be highly appreciated by customers resulting in more conversions.
Ensuring fast order processing is key to retaining customers. If it takes ages for you to complete an order, no way will your customers keep their business with you. Digital payments are designed to be much faster than traditional methods like cash or checks. Electronic payments spare your customers the time to wait for their checks to be cleared or their online purchases approved by their banks.
Digital payments offer their customers the convenience to pay with their desired payment method. Let’s face it not everyone has credit cards and also not all customers are comfortable paying with their debit cards. In the end, it will help reduce your ecommerce store’s cart abandonment rate.
- Reach More Customers
Statistics reveal that there are more than 2 billion digital buyers as of 2021. That represents 27.6 percent of the 7.74 billion people worldwide. That’s a lot of potential customers for you to tap and convert. The growing number of online shoppers gives you more reasons to adopt digital payments in your e-commerce store.
By accepting digital payments, you can make your business available for a new audience. For example, if you are offering a payment channel that is popular in their country or region, they might give your online store a shot and who knows become your regular customers. Because you are attracting new potential customers to your online store, digital payments can also help drive sales.
Digital payments also help introduce your e-commerce store to a new market that caters to your goods and services. In addition, it can help increase your profitability by making financial transactions with various customers, suppliers, and the government.
- Consistent Customer Experience
In the coming years, the battlefield will shift to customer experience. Whoever delivers the best customer experience wins the customer. Today’s breed of customers combines online shopping with other channels. 73% of customers are looking for an omnichannel experience that covers online, instore, and direct mail.
In order to ensure a consistent customer experience, your ecommerce business needs to evolve. Gone are the days when the customer experience is neglected during the payment period. You need to deliver a consistent customer experience because your interaction with them will form part of their perception of your business. Their payment experience is crucial in customers spreading a good word about your business.
First impressions last and this is true with digital payments. You want to make sure that customers will be given a smooth and seamless payment experience or else how hard it was for them to pay their order would be the last thing they will remember about your online store.
- Enhanced Transaction Security
When customers pay for something on your ecommerce website, they want to be assured of peace of mind when it comes to their payments. In addition, there is also the concern of fraud and identity theft. These days, credit card data is a frequent target for fraudsters and hackers. As reported by Identity Theft Research Center (ITRC), 294 million people had their data compromised in 2021 compared to 310 million in 2020.
By integrating a secure online payment method into your ecommerce business, you are giving your customers peace of mind and limiting the impact of fraud on your business. With online payments, you are not able to check the physical card itself but most payment gateways employ several layers of security to prevent identity theft and decline fraudulent cards.
If you are planning to initiate changes in your card payments, make sure to utilize the latest technology and stay compliant with PCI-DSS standards. Most digital payments have an extra layer of security called tokens, which converts sensitive information into nonsensitive data. Aside from that, digital payments also use security protocols like two-factor authentication and one-time passwords.
- Increased Productivity
With digital payments, everything is automated. There is no room for mistakes by a human employee. It can save your business a lot of time and effort. It has made payment processing much more efficient and less expensive. Digital payments can bring more value to your business. New technologies have made payment processing much faster and more convenient.
Digital payments save you money that you will need to pay for the services of card processors which will serve as the gateway for processing payments. In exchange for the service, you will be charged a fixed cost which is often very high. With digital payments, you just have to pay a fixed subscription to your service provider.
Digital payments can also help integrate your payment processes into one system. This way you could offer greater rewards to customers, increase authority, and reduce fraud. Digital payments help simplify payment transactions and also create a fast, easy, and secured user experience.
- Greater Flexibility
Even if you don’t have a website or ecommerce store, you can easily adopt digital payments. You can use a virtual terminal or through email using Pay by Link. You can easily integrate them on an online dashboard with all payment information and invoices at a glance. Digital payments give your customers more choices on how to pay according to their preferences.
Digital payments allow you to easily offer special promotions, discounts, or do a quick price change based on the latest marketing insights and ensure that you can generate as many sales as you can. Slowly but surely, cash and check deposits are becoming obsolete so much that 66% of business leaders expect to stop accepting these payments.
Flexibility in digital payments allows businesses to customize their solutions to fit customer needs. Customizing payments according to costs, transfer speeds, and level of support is critical to businesses and customers.
- Automated Process
With digital payments, transactions can be completed in a matter of minutes. Supporting these types of solutions makes it easier for customers to buy your products or services. The process is automated so you get access to essential functions like balance, credit information, or transaction history without the need to contact your reps. If there is an urgent concern that needs to be addressed, there is a chatbot that is available 24/7.
Thanks to automation, payment processing is no longer as labor-intensive and time-consuming as it used to be. With automation, customers can look forward to a more secure payment process. More importantly, it has resulted in improved security of the transactions. Automation has paved the way for the streamlining of the back office payment process.
Automation of payment processing has also fueled the adoption of online shopping by allowing multiple payments aside from cash and check. As people try to avoid touching anything, automation has fueled the popularity of contactless shopping.
- Reduced Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is one of the biggest challenges of e-commerce stores. Currently, the average rate of shopping cart abandonment is at 69.57%, which is very high. It can be easy for customers to abandon their shopping cart if their preferred mode of payment is not accepted. According to a study by Baymard Institute, 6% of respondents abandon their shopping carts because there are not enough payment options available.
Digital payments provide customers with an alternative payment option thereby increasing their chances of completing their purchase. It helps buyers feel positive about completing the payment of their purchase. Allowing shoppers to pay using Apple Pay or Google Wallet will encourage them to complete their purchases thereby reducing your cart abandonment rate.
Back in the day, credit cards were the only payment option. But gone are those days as many customers now prefer alternative payment methods that offer greater convenience or security. Digital payments contribute to a seamless shopping experience. It keeps your customers loyal to your store.
Tips On Simplifying Digital Payments
Here are some tips on how to make digital payments more effective in your e-commerce store.
- Create A Loyalty Program
Rewarding customers for paying online is one way of making digital payments effective. Consumers often hesitate to make online purchases if the only benefit they will get is the purchased product. Loyalty programs will encourage customers to purchase as often as possible in order to receive rewards.
Aside from frequent purchases, loyalty programs will also ensure customer retention and expand your customer base. Loyalty programs can be helpful in building rapport with your customers to reduce turnover due to lack of engagement. In addition, it also helps turn current customers into brand advocates and attract new customers along the way.
- Shorten Payment Journey
As reported by Forbes, 68% of potential customers never go on to complete their purchase. This is because the process of completing one is not only lengthy but there are unnecessary steps at the same time. Most of the time, e-commerce businesses make the mistake of requiring customers to create an account in the payment journey.
Streamlining the payment process can make digital payment in your e-commerce store more effective. There are many ways you can go about with shortening the customer journey during payment. Pre-populating fields, asking for minimal information, and keeping the payment process on a single page can help ensure that customers will successfully complete their purchase.
- Use Mobile Payment Software
Using a robust mobile payment software can help create a more straightforward and convenient payment process for customers. Aside from that, it can give them some peace of mind because their credit and debit card information are securely stored so they can pay their purchases using their smartphones.
Mobile payment software utilizes dynamic security layers that help prevent theft and fraud. Most digital payment platforms assign a unique code to users ensuring that payments are not intercepted by malicious parties ensuring a faster, more user-friendly, and secure experience.
- Enhance Payment Interoperability
Increasing payment interoperability can help increase your service. Customers expect companies to offer multiple payment methods. Payment interoperability offers more convenience for customers who are making cross-border payments. Interoperability allows customers to make purchases based on their domestic currencies.
Without payment interoperability, businesses can only implement digital payments from similar providers. As a result, this will reduce the acceptance points of your business resulting in reduced revenue conversion opportunities. Although costly and time-consuming, payment interoperability allows access to a wide range of potential clients,
- Eliminate Redirects
Getting rid of redirects can also help make digital payments simple and easy to use. It can help significantly reduce the load speed for customers to abandon the cart and leave your online store. Don’t make the mistake of redirecting customers to a separate page providing additional information about their payment details.
Redirects can help lower customer’s trust since they will have to first be redirected before going through the correct page. Moreover, it can increase anxiety among consumers who are worried about their payment information being stolen by fraudulent parties. Avoiding page redirects increases customer safety and your potential revenues.
If you have not implemented digital payments on your e-commerce store yet, chances are you could be losing potential customers to your competitors who have long implemented digital payments in their store.
Find E-Commerce Solutions With airisX
Being successful in the ecommerce space is more than just listing some products and hoping the sales arrive. airisX’s ecommerce Solutions bring together a comprehensive suite of services to cover all aspects of operating and growing an ecommerce business. This allows our clients to achieve more with less resources to transform their business for the future.
Our solutions build you a dedicated custom team within our organization to provide you with the toolbox to grow, expand, and service your customers without the overhead and headaches of doing it yourself, all at a lower cost.
airisX has a complete range of individual and complete solutions for ecommerce sellers – our bread and butter. Born out of necessity to help ecommerce sellers scale their businesses and lower their costs, we solve your pain points by bringing all your ecommerce staffing needs under one roof. Get in touch with us at contact@airisx.com and we will help you find the best solution that match your needs.