9 Tips For Boosting Your Payment Acceptance Rate (That Will Surely Improve Customer Experience)
Scopophobia is the fear of being stared at. We’ve all experienced this before. Picture the scene: you’re standing in front of the queue in a busy shop, trying to hurriedly pay for your items. Then come the dreaded words on the card machine: PAYMENT DECLINED.
Well, this problem is not limited to brick-and-mortar stores. If you’ve ever run an online store you will know that transaction errors are pervasive.
And whilst online transaction failures might not induce scopophobia, they are certainly frustrating for businesses and customers alike. In Europe alone, e-commerce transaction failures cause an estimated annual €82 billion loss for businesses.
Understanding why payments fail will put your business in a stronger position to retain willing customers. In this article, we’ll show you how to calculate payment acceptance rate, and our top tips for improving it.
What is payment acceptance rate?
Payment acceptance rate is simple to calculate. You only need to know the number of successful transactions compared to the number of attempted transactions.
But what is a good payment acceptance rate?
The answer to that question depends entirely on the context of your business. Generally speaking, you’ll want to aim for an 80% acceptance rate at least.
Why? It’s one of the key test execution metrics for assessing the customer conversion rate of your online store. After all, if you can’t accept payment from customers, then you can’t do any business with them.
(image created by writer)
Why do some payments fail?
Unfortunately, there’s not a simple answer to that question. It may be for lack of funds in the customer’s bank account. Perhaps they incorrectly input their details on your payment form. Or it could be that your acquiring bank hasn’t allowed the transaction (we’ll get to that later).
That is not to say that your business cannot take steps to reduce failed transactions. In this article, we’ll outline 9 tips for remedying this problem.
What can you do to boost payment acceptance?
Create the perfect checkout
Once your customers have reached the checkout page, the decision to buy a product or service will have already been made.
Now all that’s left is to ensure the customer’s payment goes smoothly. If it fails the first time, the likelihood is that they’ll lose patience and willingness to try again. In fact, online merchants lose 62% of customers after the first failed transaction.
In the competitive world of online commerce, there is a firm expectation that your checkout is free of barriers or complications. So, let us share our top tips for achieving this:
Stick to simple
Above all, your checkout needs to be intuitive. Overwhelming your customers with a plentitude of forms and menus is a no-go. A CXL study found single-column forms were filled out on average 15.4 seconds faster than multi-column forms. In short, simple checkouts are faster, meaning a higher conversion rate for your business.
Focus on the information you need by limiting the number of fields and indicating the optional ones. Lastly, arrange your payment form so the most time-consuming fields are at the bottom. Once the easy part is done, your customers will happily follow through with the rest.
Focus on user-friendliness
Now the basics have been covered, you’ll want to make a few accessibility improvements. It’s essential that your customers feel cared for and appreciated. Minor changes like showing the total cost at each step will help eliminate doubts about payment.
An often-overlooked addition is the humble progress bar. This visual reminder will assure your customers that finalizing their payment is just a few clicks away.
You may also want to add an auto-complete feature. For example, the customer inputs their zip code, and your checkout fetches the full address for them. Any mechanism for saving time and effort will push up that coveted customer conversion rate.
Reduce waiting times
Online commerce is all about convenience. If a page takes too long to load, there is a very real risk that your customers will leave and never return. According to LoadStorm, even a 1-second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%.
As such, it’s imperative that you regularly test your site’s loading screens. If load times are excessive, you may need to declutter problematic pages or avoid linking to external sites.
This principle applies far beyond the checkout page of your online store. Customers will quickly become irritated if they feel that your customer service responds in inadequate time. Building a team structure that responds to high-priority inquiries will mitigate this concern.
Fail to do this? You’ll test your customers’ patience and ultimately risk losing their business.
Offer delivery information
For goods that require delivery, every customer’s question will be: when?
The convenience of online shopping is deeply diminished if that question has the answer: not for a long time. Therefore, the best online stores will focus on achieving fast delivery times, then advertising that fact to their customers.
Investing in a solid inventory tracking system can help with calculating delivery costs and times at an earlier stage. This will boost customer confidence before they reach the checkout, helping to drive up sales.
Don’t forget mobile UX
Since 2016, the majority of e-commerce sales have come from users on mobile devices. Today mobile users have a 72.9% market share of the industry.This has allowed businesses to accept payment from billions of people across the world. However, it has also come with its own drawbacks. One such challenge is that mobile customers are more likely to abandon their shopping carts.
For this reason, it’s more important than ever to build a checkout that is mobile-responsive. Mobile website checkouts should be cross-channel, appearing largely similar to the desktop version.
You may even consider developing a mobile app for your online store. App checkouts will foster higher conversion rates and customer loyalty over their site-based equivalents.
Choose the right acquirer
If you run an online store, you’ll have to find an acquiring bank to process card transactions on your behalf. The acquirer is responsible for communicating with the customer’s bank before a transaction can be made.
This is the point at which many transactions fail, either because the acquirer cannot authorize or authenticate the payment. As such, choosing the right acquiring bank is an important decision for any online store to make. Factors you should consider include:
Geolocation of your customer-base
Firstly, you must think about where in the world your customers are based. Different acquirers will offer support for local languages, currencies, and payment methods.
If most of your customers are from the EU, you’ll want to partner with a European acquiring bank that is adapted to local regulations. For example, they’ll follow adequate risk assessment procedures (such as 3D-Secure verification) to ensure compliance.
Conversely, if you have an international customer base, you may consider partnering with a single payment provider. This can save you the money and headache of trying to select multiple acquirers for different regions.
Tokenization
Another consideration is to look at which services offer ‘tokenization’. This is a way of saving your customer’s payment data so that it may be automatically filled in on future visits.
There are many advantages to using tokenization. Namely, lower costs and improved security. It’s cheaper for your business as PCI compliance will be accounted for by your payment partner. It also encrypts your customer’s data and prevents it from being stolen by fraudsters.
Accept different payment options
Offering alternative payment options is an attractive method of enticing customers from around the world. Visa and MasterCard are standard in online commerce, and you must accept these forms at the very least.
Increasingly however, online stores are accepting PayPal or mobile payment options from customers. Mobile apps are particularly easy to integrate with Apple Pay or Google Pay. The convenience of pressing a single button to make a payment cannot be understated. It offers a far more timely result for the customer than filling in an entire payment form.
Of course, you may notice that problems arise more often using certain payment methods than others. In this case, you may find using regression testing services helps identify the root cause.
Communicate with your customers
Failed payments are part and parcel of online commerce, even if you follow every precaution on this list. That does not mean to say that all hope is lost. Often, reaching out to your customers after a failed attempt will prompt them to try again.
Having systems in place to automatically detect and respond to failed transactions will surely improve your customer conversion rate. This could be a simple follow-up email, or invitation to talk via voice over IP intercom.
Of course, the result will come down to the individual case. Generally speaking though, the faster you attempt to communicate, the greater the chance of success.
Conclusion
This article was written to help you understand the many facets of payment acceptance. By now you should have a good idea of why payments fail, and how to remedy those cases. Following the tips outlined above should assist in increasing customer conversion rate on your online store.
Kate Priestman – Head Of Marketing, Global App TestingKate Priestman is the Head of Marketing at Global App Testing, a trusted and leading end-to-end functional testing solution for QA challenges. Kate has over 8 years of experience in the field of marketing, helping brands achieve exceptional growth. She has extensive knowledge on brand development, lead and demand generation, and marketing strategy — driving business impact at its best. Kate Priestman also published articles for domains such as VMblog and Stackify. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
10 Tips for Turning One-Time Shoppers into Loyal Customers and Help Boost Your Sales
Any business thrives on its loyal customers. Most big ecommerce brands attempt some kind of loyalty program that keeps people coming back. Nearly every B2B company has a small number of key accounts bringing in most of the revenue.
If you don’t have that stable of repeat buyers, you’re missing out. Not only do you lack that consistent source of revenue, but it might also suggest you’re not doing enough to earn those loyal customers.
Work from home platforms have changed the world and people are shopping online more than ever, too. This is a great time to be in ecommerce. With people more willing to buy online, customer acquisition costs should be falling. When you know how to turn those first-time buyers into brand evangelists, the opportunity is huge.
But how can you do that? Let’s go over ten tips you can use to turn first-time buyers into loyal customers.
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What is customer loyalty?
We should make a distinction between “repeat buyers” and “loyal customers”. Repeat buyers will come back to you again and again when you announce new products or seasonal offers – you have their number and you don’t need to sell them hard on new campaigns.
Loyal customers are fully-engaged brand evangelists. They splashed out on a Peak Design backpack once and now they wouldn’t consider anyone else’s. They won’t buy a computer that doesn’t have an apple on it. In a B2B context, these would be the key accounts that the sales team knows on a first-name basis.
Not only are these the most financially valuable customers, but they’re also the core audience which the business should work to serve. What’s good for your most engaged customers, is good for the rest of them, and what’s good for them is good for the business. Listen closely to your most loyal customers, and you can’t go wrong.
You’d be lucky to turn even a small proportion of your customers into loyal customers. However, the benefit of trying to convert as many people as you can is that these loyal customers can become brand evangelists who’ll do your marketing for you. If they spend a lifetime recommending your product to everyone they talk to, your customer acquisition costs trend a little bit closer to zero.
With some simple incentives and easy-to-use referral tracking software, you can encourage and reward brand evangelists without the work of running a whole affiliate program.
How, though, do you inspire loyalty from one-time shoppers? Here’s ten top tips:
1. Use email
Most ecommerce companies are collecting customer emails to send receipts and to get in contact if something goes wrong in the shipping process. But how many of those companies are using that email to build a relationship with those customers?
Many companies don’t go beyond simple, transactional emails with titles like “Get 10% off now”. Consider how you could email more “brand marketing” content like short blogs or articles on the way you do things, and what makes you different from your competitors.
Think about what a dedicated email flow for that would look like – how you should introduce yourself to first-time buyers once they’ve ordered, and what you think they need to know about who you are. You can iterate and A/B test that flow until you get it exactly right, just like any other marketing effort.
You can also weave your brand story into those transactional emails. If you add a little bit of that messaging into your order confirmation email, customers will be seeing it every time they buy from you.
2. Create great experiences
People aren’t going to become loyal customers unless you provide a great experience. It’s why Apple put so much effort into their Apple Stores, from the staff who are paid to focus on educating customers rather than selling, to the cash registers and cables hidden inside the tables.
For an online store, creating a great experience means conducting a mobile usability test on all platforms like iOS, Android, etc. If you want to turn a first-time buyer into a loyal customer, you have to make sure everyone’s first impression of your site is flawless.
And it doesn’t stop there. When your customer gets their package delivered, make sure this is a great experience too. Sending your products in nice, branded packaging is just the start. Think about the whole experience.
Make sure you’re providing any helpful information the customer might need. Track the delivery and as soon as they receive it, send them an email or SMS with a friendly message and a link to useful pages on your site.
3. Offer discounts
Discounts are a tried and true tactic for boosting sales in ecommerce. It’s also very easy to personalize those discounts to specific customers. Every positive interaction a buyer has with your brand is an opportunity to turn them into a repeat customer, so you want to encourage as many of those interactions as possible.
4. Be proactive
Proactively following up with customers is a big part of customer care. If you wait until there’s a problem and the customer comes to you, then their only interactions with you will be when there’s something wrong. Over time, that builds up negative associations with you and your brand.
When your customer receives a tracked delivery, you could send them an email a few days later asking how the product is and if they have any comments or questions.
As well as building relationships with customers, this is a great way to gather data you can use to improve your product or service. More simply, it’s a great way to catch a product issue or computer bug that you might not notice in QA.
5. Exceed expectations
From internet service to energy providers, people are used to a poor level of customer service, especially over the phone. By exceeding expectations in every interaction, from your online store to customer service, you can surprise and delight users whether it’s via a customer support chat or in a virtual healthcare waiting room.
6. Use a loyalty program
A customer loyalty program won’t turn visitors into brand evangelists, but it can turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. That repeated exposure to your company gives you more opportunities to build up brand recognition and turn repeat buyers into loyal customers.
You can also use the loyalty program to offer a more personalized service. This could take the form of discounts on customers’ birthdays or other personalized offers based on their buying activity.
7. Use retargeting ads
Retail is a seasonal business, and for ecommerce stores, there’s a lot of value in turning seasonal buyers into repeat customers. Retargeted ads on social media can follow those users around Facebook and Instagram based on what they’ve done in your app, allowing you to get them back onto your site for a second or third time. Retargeting reduces the cart abandonment rate by 6.5% and can increase online sales by up to 20%.
8. Leverage seasonal marketing
When you do have a seasonal peak, one with an influx of new customers, it’s an opportunity to turn people into repeat customers. Seasonal marketing strategies like limited-time discounts and special offers for your loyalty program can help make repeat buyers of people who have bought from you before.
You can think of your first-time-buyer-to-loyal-customer pipeline like any other marketing funnel. Once you have your “bottom of the funnel” activities figured out, you can focus your seasonal marketing on attracting new first-time buyers knowing you’ll convert a number of them to repeat buyers in the future.
9. Use data
To turn your one-time buyers into loyal customers, you need to understand them. And you can’t understand your customers at scale without good data.
One of the reasons why a mobile app is a must have for small businesses is that you can collect more detailed data on the way customers interact with you.
Whether you’re an ecommerce giant or a small coffee chain collecting people’s favorite orders, even a relatively simple app can give you valuable data while improving the customer experience.
10. Make it personal
Personalization is one of the most powerful ways you can create memorable experiences for your customers, with 90% of consumers surveyed finding marketing personalization appealing.
One of the advantages of an ecommerce mobile app for your online store is that you can offer a high degree of personalization, from recommended products to push notifications on offers you know they’ll be interested in.
Personalized experiences could be as simple as recommending products you think they’d like. You can also use your marketing emails or mobile app notifications to send them offers you think they’d like at the time they’re most likely to buy.
Using the customer loyalty funnel to boost sales
With a combination of some of these ten tips, you can start to turn more of your one-time buyers into loyal customers. Just like any other marketing funnel you can learn from your successes, double down on what works, and use this knowledge to boost your sales in the long run.
Matthew Cooper – Marketing Automation & Operations Manager, Global App TestingMatthew Cooper is the Marketing Automation & Operations Manager at Global App Testing, a best-in-class software testing company that has helped top apps such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Craigslist deliver high-quality software at speed all over the world. Matthew has over 14 years of experience in the I.T Networking, Software & Services Industries. He is highly skilled in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Content Marketing, Digital Advertising, Social Media Management, WordPress, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, CRM, and People Management. You can find him on LinkedIn. He has also written content for DZone and BigCommerce.
9 Ecommerce Growth Hacks That Will Boost Your Sales
In the internet age, effectively growing awareness of your online presence and converting leads into sales is crucial to your business’ success. It is not enough to simply be online and offer products – you want to be selling them. This is where ecommerce growth hacks come in.
Growth hacks are cost-effective and low-resource marketing tactics to rapidly grow a business, using rapid experimentation and regular testing to improve the customer experience.
Growth hacking used to be the exclusive domain of early-stage startups. Startups are often in the challenging position of having to achieve rapid growth on a tight timeline and an even tighter budget, leaving them unable to resort to traditional marketing. However, nowadays even the biggest companies have started exploring the utility and relevance of growth hacks for their business models.
To truly maximize your online sales and success, you should consider implementing ecommerce growth hacks into your business strategy.
When integrating growth hacks into your organization, make sure to also consider how well your online presence functions more generally – is it working securely and as intended? You’ll want your IT team to be able to create efficient bug reports in software testing for your platforms to run as smoothly as possible.
There are a plethora of growth hacks out there, but it’s hard to know where to start – or which to prioritize. This article will help you to get a start in your own organization with nine straightforward and actionable growth hacks that will boost your sales.
1. FOMO & the power of urgency
The customer’s journey is time-sensitive. Customers only have so much time to spend looking for products, and unless it’s a truly urgent purchase they will browse and compare at their own leisure.
For this potential customer to choose your product or service and choose it as soon as possible, you need to present them with an enticing offer, that they know they need to jump on quickly. This is where FOMO, or the ‘fear of missing out’, comes in.
FOMO, is a social phenomenon that, as the name implies, can prompt quick decision making for fear of missing out. Use it sparingly – too often and your buyer will learn they can simply wait for your next limited time offer – and you can create a sense of urgency in your prospective customer.
Utilize ‘limited time offer’ pop-up ads on your website, and send out email campaigns to your subscribers emphasizing the scarcity of supply and limited time they have left to pick up this deal.
2. Popularity & peer pressure
Closely related to FOMO, you should also utilize the psychology of popularity. Your buyers are human, and humans are social creatures – we care about and take note of what our peers do. If a product is selling out quickly, it appears popular and thus attractive: ‘lots of people have/want this, maybe I need it too!’
The value of a product is increased in the eyes of the potential customer because they can see it is valued by their peers. This influences the potential buyer’s desire to make a purchase while they have the chance.
You need to give your potential buyer to see a product’s popularity linked to a sense of scarcity. Again, use these methods sparingly, but you might consider implementing things like a real-time stock counter for items you want to emphasize as limited. You might also include product reviews to emphasize quality, and might even highlight how many people purchased that particular item within the last hour.
Once those customers are inevitably enticed to make the purchase, you’ll also want to have a robust online payment gateway in place.
3. Reward Programmes – giving them a reason to come back
Rewarding a customer’s loyalty and continued business is a simple yet extremely effective growth hack. You want to keep your customer invested in your brand. After all, if they see exclusive rewards for repeat business, why would they go elsewhere where they’d have to build a new relationship?
If a customer trusts in your brand and feels that they are valued, they will come back for more.
If a customer visits a set number of pages, or a particular page or product, perhaps offer them a discount. Better yet, incorporate an email sign-up where they can join your subscription list, offering them something like a % discount for their first or subsequent orders.
Here’s an example from popular clothing brand AllSaints:
You don’t have to offer discounts constantly for these reward programmes to do the trick. Even the occasional offer will incentivise a customer to return.
Use this sparingly. After all, if the discounts are constant, customers will never even have the opportunity to pay full price.
4. Mobile apps – always with the consumer on the go
Mobile apps are great, aren’t they? Easily within reach, accessible to everyone with a smartphone – 85% of US adults as of 2021. And that number is only increasing.
People love their phones, they love the apps on them, and they love to spend money on those apps. Global app revenue has climbed 15% year-over-year in Q3 2021 to nearly $34 billion. That’s an incredible increase! There is global opportunity here, that you need to have the means to engage with.
Creating a mobile app that is specifically optimized for mobile users will ensure the best possible experience for your potential customers who are always on the go. There are numerous advantages of ecommerce mobile apps that you need to be utilizing right now.
With that in mind, you don’t want pop-ups too small to read or click – make sure that the UI (user interface) is as easy to read and understand as possible. Customer experience is essential to gain the benefits of an app. In order to incentivise app use, consider offering exclusive discounts or products only available to the app user.
If you’re struggling or want to know more about the software, there are always QA conferences ongoing globally.
5. Cart abandonment – how to handle
This is a big one. Cart abandonment is a big issue felt especially on mobile devices, where up to 85% of purchases on a cell phone are abandoned at cart.
Potential customers can get distracted or put off, even at as late a stage in the customer’s journey as adding a specific product to their cart. You want to avoid and minimize this distraction and incentivise their making a purchase as much as possible.
Shipping fees are a major reason for a buyer to be put off at the last second. Consider offering free shipping to entice those customers to finalize their purchase. Remember also to scale discounts or incentives accordingly.
Free shipping is great for buyers who don’t meet the minimum threshold, but is useless to those who do. For these customers, consider offering upgraded shipping that will deliver what they considered purchasing sooner.
You should be using critical features like network monitoring to make sure that everything is working as intended; a smooth service will also reduce cart abandonment.
6. Live chat – hey, I’m talkin’ here
Nobody wants to spend ages looking for answers to their questions. If info about your product or service isn’t easily accessible, consider adding a live chat feature. This gives the potential customer the chance to communicate in real-time, getting answers for their specific questions and issues in a responsive and tailored way.
Live chat is a conversation, and feels much more engaging and high-effort than something like a simple FAQ section. This makes the customer feel valued, which in turn increases the customer’s time spent on your online site and positively impacts customer satisfaction, loyalty and conversion rates. Software QA companies are a great way to monitor the success and impact of this feature.
7. Minimalism & optimisation – less is more
Simplification and streamlining are enormously beneficial growth hacks to boost sales.
What do we mean by this? Consider the UI of a theoretical online site. There might be buttons everywhere, redirections and just too much information in the customer’s face. It is likely all these redirects contain important info and features for the potential customer, but they also present something you want to avoid at all costs – distraction.
Constant suggestion, too many options can overwhelm, so keep it simple. A single ‘proceed to checkout’ button will suffice, instead of overloading the customer with options like ‘empty basket’ or redirecting them to another page.
Here’s how the ecommerce juggernaut Amazon approaches things:
I typed in ‘T-shirts’, and added the first item from my search to my basket. I was brought to this page, with simple next steps and related products. I have only the necessary info, and don’t feel overwhelmed with ads or overly pressured – less is more.
Be careful too not to inundate with options to sign up to email lists – you don’t want to appear desperate or overly promotional. If you like what you see from Amazon, know also that you can use fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to utilize their efficient system to get your orders filled fast.
8. Competitions and giveaways – give and you shall receive
Competitions are a win-win. If you do a giveaway, someone will win – that’s great for them. But in the process, you could win many, many new leads – that’s great for you.
This is a pretty straightforward hack. You garner interest, publicity, and incentivize potential customers by making them aware that you have products and/or services that they could win, completely free of charge.
Giveaways can be used to sign people up to your email campaigns or to tag their friends in social media posts thus generating more publicity. Giveaways get them to follow your page, exposing them to more of what you have to offer to them, and lead to sales and positive reviews.
Expanding your reach is essential to boosting sales, and competitions are a great way to do so. If you haven’t tried one, now’s the time to give giveaways a shot.
9. Consistency is key
Consistency builds trust in a brand.
Let’s take the example of Nike’s brand. When I think of Nike, I know what the brand offers in terms of quality, price, you name it – Nike is a known quantity. This is because they are consistent. Across platforms, in language, in UI, in their iconic ‘tick’ branding – I know what I’m going to get.
This builds familiarity and trust – and subsequently, sales – that a brand that’s all over the place or confusing cannot hope to emulate. Nike offers a consistent service, and its customers have invested an understanding of it. You should also consider things like the social values your brand presents.
Let’s illustrate this further. Imagine it was my birthday. I’m a loyal customer and Nike offered me 10% off my next purchase – wonderful! What a great birthday treat. But then next week when it’s my friend’s birthday, they get offered 15% off. As a loyal customer, how do you think I’ll feel about Nike then? They offered me a birthday discount – which they didn’t have to – but it wasn’t the same for everyone.
Inconsistency negatively affects customer perception and sales. Make sure that marketing tactics are clearly communicated amongst your organization. It is vital that you avoid appearing inconsistent at all costs. For comprehensive communication to maintain inconsistency across larger teams, consider implementing free WebEx alternatives. Communication is key in ensuring your growth hacking efforts are well-integrated across your organization.
With that in mind, you’re ready to begin your journey into growth hacking. After a little initial planning and deciding what tactics are best suited to your organization, you’ll begin seeing results in your growth and marketing reach in no time.
Kate Priestman – Head Of Marketing, Global App TestingKate Priestman is the Head of Marketing at Global App Testing, a trusted and leading end-to-end functional testing solution and automation test planning for QA challenges. Kate has over 8 years of experience in the field of marketing, helping brands achieve exceptional growth. She has extensive knowledge on brand development, lead and demand generation, and marketing strategy — driving business impact at its best. Kate Priestman also published articles for domains such as CEO Blog Nation and Stackify. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
