How to Improve Your Online Business

Your website is live with beautiful images, witty copy, and a strong product offering, so now you can just sit back and wait for the online sales to roll in…right? Not quite.

Delighting your customers and driving sales is an ongoing effort. To keep your online business running smoothly you need to continually optimize its performance—that means refining existing processes and incorporating new technologies to stay one step ahead of your competitors.

Staying on top of all this might sound like a lot of work, so we came up with some ideas to get you started.

1. Embed Payments Directly on Your Site

These days life is all about convenience, and when you’re online that means easy access and instant results.

Redirecting customers to another site to complete their purchase takes precious time and clicks—and might cost you a sale. A long or complicated checkout process is one of the biggest reasons customers abandon their online purchases, so ensuring your website’s checkout process is quick, painless, and barrier-free can help your customers cross the finish line.

One way to avoid cart abandonment is by embedding payments with a customized checkout tool, so customers don’t need to leave your site to complete their transaction. An optimized checkout solution makes for a faster, seamless experience right on your own site, so your customers can browse and buy in no time at all.

2. Experiment with Payment Options

Do you only accept payments made using major credit cards? It’s no great surprise that consumers love options. When customers have many ways to pay, they are more likely to make a purchase—in fact, 6% of those who abandon their online shopping cart list a lack of payment options as the cause.

One way to give your customers more choice is to support payments made using a digital wallet like Visa Checkout or Apple Pay. With features like tokenization and fingerprint authentication, these tools are extremely secure and extremely user-friendly—two attractive features for you and your customers.

You can experiment with different wallets to see which ones give you the best results. Accepting the digital wallet associated with your customers’ most commonly used credit card is a good place to begin.

3. Understand How Your Customers Are Behaving

If you want to boost online sales, start by getting to know your customers and how they behave. When do they visit your site? Where do they click? How long do they spend on each page? At what point do they leave without making a purchase?

Using Google Analytics (GA) on your website can help you see where customers are abandoning their carts and which pages are converting best. Sure it’s not a “payment tool” per se, but GA insights can help you test your checkout fields and streamline your payment process, making it a valuable payment integration.

Look for pages with a high bounce rate and determine how you can make it easier for customers to keep moving forward. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes: Is the payment process unclear? Is any key information left out?

4. Streamline the Data Your Customers Submit

Detailed customer data can help you make better decisions and create more personalized experiences, but pester them for too much info and you can quickly scare them off. For a speedy checkout and happy customers, it’s best to keep things streamlined.

There are a few ways you can collect data more effectively. First off, those digital wallets we mentioned earlier can actually save your customers time (and patience) by pre-populating fields. Once a customer has signed up and signed in, services like Visa Checkout or Apple Pay will remember their payment information, so all they have to do is enter a PIN or present their fingerprint to complete a purchase.

You can also use intelligent payment forms like those offered by Formstack, a Bambora partner, to connect the data collected at checkout in one app with all your other apps. By setting up automatic transaction calculations and discount codes, smart payment forms can reduce friction and minimize time-consuming manual tasks for you and your customers.

There is Always Room to Improve

Setting up your website to accept online payments is not a one-and-done process. If you want to push your online business to new heights, you need to refine it constantly. Incorporating new payment tools designed to increase conversions can alleviate frustrations for you and your customers.

For more tips on payment tools, read about how the right payment tools can benefit your business, or sign up with Bambora and let us help you manage your online payments headache-free.

Photo: Pressmaster / Shutterstock