Payment Options (with no merchant account and not PayPal!)

Scotty #

Does anyone know of any good payment options that do not require a merchant account and that integrate well?

Realex would be the preferred option but this business is not ready yet for a Merchant Account.

PayPal is their only payment option at the moment but getting a lot of abandoned carts.

3sixty

Scotty # wrote: »

Does anyone know of any good payment options that do not require a merchant account and that integrate well?

Realex would be the preferred option but this business is not ready yet for a Merchant Account.

PayPal is their only payment option at the moment but getting a lot of abandoned carts.

I will come in from another angle as you know the importance of integrating something like realex.

Have you gone through the buying process yourself ? Customers often exit here due to high delivery charges or even a technical glitch at the end as well...

When you have ruled that out try contacting them by email with a link to their checkout page to remind them what they left behind or a discount code to complete the process...

Better still, send them to a survey to ask them why they never completed the checkout process. Give a discount code for completing the survey and include the link to their checkout page to complete the process.

Hope this helps.

3sixty

Scotty # wrote: »

Does anyone know of any good payment options that do not require a merchant account and that integrate well?

Realex would be the preferred option but this business is not ready yet for a Merchant Account.

PayPal is their only payment option at the moment but getting a lot of abandoned carts.

I will come in from another angle as you know the importance of integrating something like realex.

Have you gone through the buying process yourself ? Customers often exit here due to high delivery charges ( i have seen double delivery charge being created) or even a technical glitch at the end as well...

When you have ruled that out try contacting them by email with a link to their checkout page to remind them what they left behind or a discount code to complete the process...

Better still, send them to a survey to ask them why they never completed the checkout process. Give a discount code for completing the survey and include the link to their checkout page to complete the process.

Hope this helps.

Scotty #

Hi 3sixty,

Yea, been through the buying process and there's a few things I'm looking at implementing. Firstly, guest checkout or 'quick checkout'. At the moment customers have to register.

Secondly, a one page checkout. Currently about 4 pages to get to payment... Register - Shipping - Confirmation - Payment. Got some feedback from a customer today who said there was too much to fill out and they would complete it when they are at home later.

Also looking at STRIPE as a payment option. No merchant account required, cheaper than paypal, and no redirect.

tricky D

A couple of notes:

Forcing users to register creates resistance damaging conversion, as you are realising. Try to avoid unless very necessary.

On the second point, beware making changes on the basis of feedback from a single user (unless they are a big money client). The user's feedback you note above goes against the general psychology grain that forms broken up into sub-tasks perform better for conversion as they are perceived as shorter, even though they are more or less the same. The user in question still will be completing a similar amount of tasks. Try breaking the form up into stages that progress within the same page using AJAX or similar, instead of having the stages in separate pages. Again the actual difference is negligible but users perceive a new page load more negatively and seeing process stage tabs above the form helps them get a better handle on progress as well as some navigation advantages.

Lastly, on coupon offerings, be careful as the psychology isn't as straightforward as you might think often with significant disadvantages and the type of method described by 3sixty above is harder to test for well. As for a survey, most bailouts won't bother resulting in a very skewed test result set.

As with most methods to do with improving conversion, they are rarely black and white matters so test, test, test.

3sixty

Scotty # wrote: »

Hi 3sixty,

Yea, been through the buying process and there's a few things I'm looking at implementing. Firstly, guest checkout or 'quick checkout'. At the moment customers have to register.

Secondly, a one page checkout. Currently about 4 pages to get to payment... Register - Shipping - Confirmation - Payment. Got some feedback from a customer today who said there was too much to fill out and they would complete it when they are at home later.

Also looking at STRIPE as a payment option. No merchant account required, cheaper than paypal, and no redirect.

You seem to be on the right track now. Just take out out the register first bit and give it as an option at the end. Regarding my survey bit that I previously mentioned, I use the survey on some of my own sites as a pop up when they do not complete the checkout process. I find it works pretty well. Listen your going to get cart abondonment anyway. It is just a fact of being online. There is nothing you can do but reduce that percentage figure down.

Good luck.

Scotty #

Thanks for the advice, both of you.

I manage other ecommerce sites but cart abandonment on this one is particularly high. As it's the only one that offers only PayPal as a payment option I had put this down as the reason for the abandonments. I have now implemented a guest/quick checkout and reduced the checkout flow to one page. Currently waiting on the owner to purchase a SSL cert so she can add STRIPE as a payment option. We'll see if there's an improvement then.

I'm using Opencart. There is an extension that emails customers who didn't complete payment after X days reminding them that X, Y, Z are still in their cart and has the option to offer them a coupon if they wish to proceed. Apparently it has a 70% success rate. Might be worth the investment.