Nura Eston June 3, 2021
Of all the changes we’ve seen as a result of COVID-19, one of the biggest—and most lasting—might just be in how we shop. In fact, with transactions totalling $ 4.6 trillion USD, eCommerce saw nearly 20% YoY growth worldwide in 2020. The pandemic has shown us all that eCommerce makes shopping easier, and ordering online has become commonplace for everything from clothing to groceries to household goods. Here are some trends that can help deliver a more enjoyable shopping experience for your customers.
Mobile payments
When you’re setting up your online store, it’s essential to make sure that your website is mobile ready. It should be as intuitive and easy to follow and read as it would be from a laptop. With more people using their smartphones to go online every year, optimizing your website for mobile just makes sense.
What are some things to consider? Keep navigation simple, with short menus that are easy to follow. Avoid using popups. Test your site on a phone to make sure your fonts and buttons are the right size. And pay particular attention to how customers move from step to step in the sales process: make it easy to search for products, add products to a shopping cart and complete the purchase.
Google Pay and Apple Pay
Payment wallets on a phone aren’t only for tap payments in stores. They make the checkout process much easier for online shopping too! Because Google Pay and Apple Pay let customers save their credit or debit card details in the app, when you offer these digital wallets as an express checkout option, customers can purchase items quickly, with no need to enter their payment details and shipping information. This is especially important for customers shopping on their mobile device: clicking a button to make a purchase is much easier than using a tiny keyboard to type their name, address and payment information.
What else do digital wallets offer? In addition to convenience, they’re also secure. All card details are tokenized, so no actual credit card or debit card numbers change hands. This makes it much more difficult for fraudsters to access the information, which benefits businesses as much as customers.
User accounts
When customers save their payment information and shipping details in a customer account, they can use one-click payments or tokenization, which stores their information from the last time they visited your shop. That lets customers check out quickly, without the hassle of re-entering their information every time they make a purchase.
How do one-click payments work? When customers enter their payment information on your website and opt to save their information for future visits, you’re not actually storing any of their information on your own site. Instead, only the acquiring bank and the certified payment gateway are allowed to access and store the card details. Those details are then tokenized, or converted into unique symbols. The next time the customer visits your online store, the tokenized card is accessed when they make a purchase. Your business doesn’t need to worry about storing sensitive customer information: all transaction information is processed securely by the payment processor, with all card details protected.
User accounts also make it easier for your business to reach out to customers. Want to follow up with a customer who has left items in a shopping cart? How about offering a special discount to your best customers? User accounts make that possible.
Attracting customers to your website is only the first step: next you have to get them to buy. Then, if you’ve done it right, with a seamless, easy-to-navigate online store, you’ll see them come back for repeat visits. Invest in an easy online checkout process. It doesn’t take a lot of time to set up, and it will more than pay for itself in increased sales.
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