When it comes to e-commerce, there are many aspects of the buying process that can affect the customer’s decision to purchase. With traditional retail stores, you could often use a personal selling approach to answer any queries that a customer had and then convert them to a sale. In the online world, real-time interaction is rare. Clients either like or don’t like what you have to offer and often make their buying decision without you being able to influence that sales conversion much. From one perspective, you might say that it has made selling online more difficult. Another approach is that it is a good thing. That if you take a superbly efficient operations approach and offer the customer everything they need, there will be no hesitation in the buying process. Customer conversions will happen almost automatically. This may sound idealistic but when you start to learn more about how customers purchase online, you can see how this may be true.

Customer Priorities When Shopping Online

Customers are generally looking for three main things when shopping online — a specific product or service to meet a need or solve a problem they have, an easy and efficient way to shop, and a convenient form of payment and delivery. If you can focus on providing these three things to your customers, you will see great results in your sales conversions. Often, when customers are shopping online, they already know what they want. An online search may direct them to your website. For many businesses, that is the difficult part. It is therefore absolutely essential that once you gain a visitor to your website, you do everything possible to convert them to a sale.

Easy and Efficient Shopping Process

Most customers shop online because it is convenient. They can access the Internet from wherever they are and be able to browse through product catalogs. Customers have come to expect that a site should load quickly and that the search responses are almost instantaneous. This means that your database of products must be properly configured and your search tools must be accurately defined. Customers also want an easy transition from when they decide to make the purchase to going ahead and paying for it. Your checkout process is therefore one of the most important aspects of your e-commerce site.

What Customers Want in the Checkout Process

There are a few things that are important to customers when purchasing online, relating specifically to the checkout process. Get these things right and you can see many more sales conversions. Get these things wrong and you could unknowingly be losing customers and business. The most important thing to remember is that customers do not want hassle. The buying process must be easy and effortless. In order to facilitate this, your checkout process needs to be top quality. Most importantly, you need to be able to accept credit card payments. Most customers shopping online prefer to pay using their credit cards. Some studies have shown that as much as 75 percent of all online transactions are done using credit cards. On your site, clearly show which types of credit cards you accept. Most people have more than one credit card so if there are certain types of credit cards that you don’t accept, they will know not to purchase with that particular card. Card merchant service providers will tell you that card security is of the utmost importance. Customers are also aware of this. You should therefore have a valid and up-to-date security certificate for your site. This gives customers the peace of mind that it is safe to transact on your website.

Perfecting Your Card Processing System

How you process credit card payments is probably one of the most important aspects of your e-commerce site. If the system is inefficient or keeps going down or timing out, customers will get frustrated and simply log off your website. If there are too many steps in the process, it makes it an effort for the customer. Try to keep the payment steps to as few as possible. Ideally, you should have one form where customers input their payments details, a second form which summarizes their shopping cart and purchase information, and a final form that asks them to confirm that they want to make the purchase. Once they click on the confirm button, the system should immediately request authorization on the transaction. Make sure that the card processing system you are using is able to obtain authorizations quickly. Most customers expect the authorization to come through in 30 seconds or less. Once the transaction has been completed, you should have a page confirming the purchase and detailing the delivery. The entire checkout process should take between two and five minutes. Keeping things simple and efficient can help you make many more conversions.

At Card Processing Pros.com we provide credit card processing and debit card processing, literally setting up hundreds of clients per month to process card payments for storefront, Internet and phone/mail order-based businesses. We also offer services in electronic check and gift card processing. Visit online today.

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