Getting paid online is efficient, fast and safe.
Let’s be honest, it’s relatively easy to slap a payment method (eg PayPal) on your website and consider you have online payments sorted.
Wrong. If you are serious about reducing slow payers and improving your clients online payment experience you need to respect five key payment criteria.
1) Provide Several Payment Methods
It sounds obvious but you’ll be surprised at the websites that only offer single way to pay. It’s neither necessary nor practical to offer every way to pay so be guided by what your target audience/clients want.
Many small businesses use credit cards to both track payments and earn travel or reward points. Other businesses have very strict policies about NOT using loyalty cards (they can be expensive) and they prefer to pay using only Direct Credit or other bank to bank transfers.
Some clients, (older?) might prefer to pay by cheque, while others (younger?) might prefer to use cryptocurrency – eg Bitcoin.
Other clients may select a spread monthly payment option like smartAR – Fee Funding, if they are offered.
From the screenshot below, you can see how a smartAR – Payment Page can accommodate all the different payment options you choose to accept in a single place.
2) Allow Payments without Requiring an Account
Honestly, who really wants another username and password to remember? So, beware forcing people to sign up for an account to make payment.
Another disadvantage is that it adds more fields for people to fill out and prolongs the payment process.
3) Deliver a Seamless Design
From a branding perspective, you’ll want to keep everything as consistently as possible.
This means using similar colours & design as the rest of your website.
If possible, also use the landscape of the payment page to integrate back to other key messages you are seeking to communicate. This in turn promotes your branded experience to the client.
4) Ask for Essential Information
Nobody likes filling out a form with unnecessary information, so don’t put any hurdles in the way of people trying to pay you. The goal is to be as frictionless as possible.
How would you prefer to pay? Then action that.
5) Security and Privacy
We are all becoming more concerned about the security of our private information. It is important to reassure clients that you respect that and provide a secure place from which to action payment.
A survey by eConsultancy found that 58% of respondents dropped out of retail checkout pages due to concerns about payment security.
It’s important to have a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate for your hosted page in order to provide a secure connection and encrypt credit card information.
Be certain too that any third parties connecting to your site are compliant with any standards of the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). PCI compliance is enforced by payment card companies, while the council itself manages the security standards for anyone who stores, transmits, or processes cardholder data.
Conclusion
Having a payment page that is both seamless (integrated & branded) and frictionless (easy access to a range of payment options) is the key to increasing cash flow and reducing slow payers.
About smartAR - Payment Pages
Payments is a huge industry these days – Banks, Gateways, Credit Cards, Accounting Systems, Digital & Crypto providers are all wanting you to use their solution – and only theirs – to process payments.
No surprise then that it is confusing, not to mention expensive, for Billers to create flexible, multi-payment method portals. It is even harder to build one that is also totally secure and can integrate with your own branding and messaging.
A smartAR – Payment Page solves this problem since it is eloquently simple and cost-efficient.
A smartAR – Payment Page bridges the gap between being both client-centric (offering multiple payment options) and providing a secure, frictionless and cost-efficient method to access all your ways to pay.