3 ways to increase conversion with an optimised payment experience

Imagine this scenario; a customer takes the time through the sales funnel and finally takes action. Then at the point of purchase, there’s a difficulty with the payment that ends the customer’s journey.

Since the early days of e-commerce, this has been a head-scratcher. Shopping cart abandonment has continued to be a problem as merchants struggle to convert customers. In Africa, the situation is even direr for merchants, with Statista reporting a 90.88% online shopping cart abandonment rate in 2020.

To curb this, merchants have made several adjustments to retain customers by upgrading everything from the actual payment process page to the customer experience. Even with these improvements, there are still missing steps to ensure conversion, which has continued to hurt e-commerce businesses.

With so many options available for customers on the internet, it should be of utmost importance to merchants to make it hard for people to leave. Having more thoughtful payment options is one retention method. Not offering an optimised payment experience for customers could be detrimental to your business, lead to decreased sales and severe reputational damage to your company.

Making sure your customers have an optimised payment experience makes excellent business sense. The wait-time for customers will reduce drastically, making your company more attractive. With the ease of payment, customers are likely to convert faster and return to make purchases in the future.

Making payment easy for your customers, no matter their location and how they want to pay, has great benefits for your business.
These are five ways to optimise the payment experience for your business.

A 2020 Instant payment annual statistics released by the Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) revealed that 78% of total instant payments in Nigeria in 2020 were done on mobile devices.
It’s similar in several other African countries where the number has also increased since that report due to continued internet penetration.
To achieve this, test your checkout on multiple devices and operational systems, reduce the number of required fields and steps and make inputting data easy with large buttons and clean layouts.
Fincra’s payment pages are mobile-friendly and designed to make it easier for customers to enter their data.

Making payment as seamless as possible increases conversion for your business. One of the ways to do that is by storing payment credentials. When paying with a card, a returning customer should only have to input a little to save time. All the additional fields should be pre-filled with previously saved data.

First-time customers should be given the opportunity to save details for future purchases, which they can authenticate with a password, CVV or fingerprint.

Customers want payment methods they are familiar with at checkout, which is often the local option. As an e-commerce merchant, it is essential to accept local payments to reach more people and improve the payment experience. The more alternatives on your website, the more conversion.