Give Customers An Easy Path To Payment

As Internet marketers, we spend a great deal of time and effort trying to seduce people to enter our sales funnel by one way or another. We’re always searching for new ways of improving and streamlining this process, refining it to make it as natural as possible, so that we reduce people’s usual resistance to spending money, and get them as new customers, maybe even for life. Everything that we learn as part of this process is designed to remove as many stumbling blocks as possible and to make it a “no-brainer” for the prospect or soon-to-be client. For many organizations however, this procedure can hit a giant sized stumbling block when it comes to the actual payment methodology, which can leave much to be desired!

While you might have done your work to a very high standard to entice prospects into that sales funnel in the first place, and they might even be highly motivated to buy from you, however the actual payment process is yet to be completed. This can be a somewhat traumatic experience for many people and is the point in the whole process where you are likely to have more bailouts than anywhere else. You certainly need to ensure that all elements of security are addressed here for obvious reasons, but you must remove any obstacles and streamline this process as much as possible.

If you’re trying to entice a first-time customer, you should avoid placing too many steps in the transaction process. While you must adequately describe your product or service within the body of the site and cover shipping and other questions prior to checkout, do not make prospects jump through any unnecessary hoops. This includes the need for them to register and sign up for an account with you before they can go any further. By all means ask them to do this after they have committed to giving you money, but it has been proven time and again that the more steps you put in the process the higher the likelihood that you are going to get bailouts.

Look at your entire checkout process from a neutral point of view and get someone who you trust, who is not directly involved with your site, to go through the process and give you adequate feedback. The whole thing should flow nicely and it should be possible for the transaction to be completed in an almost subconscious manner. The consumer has generally got a good idea of how these things should work and if your online business operation has an unexpected hiccup they will not like it.

You put too much effort into the attraction of a potential client to let him or her disappear due to a cumbersome payment process. If you check your analytics program and see people leaving your site before they get to the confirmation page you need to ask yourself why and find out the reason pretty quickly!

Adam Toren, Co-Founder of Young Entrepreneur, specializes in developing the profitability of struggling businesses with a specialised and ‘bottom line’ approach. Adam, along with his brother, have created, purchased and sold a variety of companies over the years. At the moment, they own and manage a highly successful publishing company and several dedicated online enterprises.

Filed under: Online Business, Promotion and Marketing

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