5 essential tips for optimising your payment page

In the era of booming eCommerce, fine-tuning the checkout process holds paramount importance, especially when it comes to the payment page. Research published by Baymard Institute illustrate that businesses witness an increase in conversions by more than 35% with a more optimised checkout design.

Seeing the pivotal role of the payment page in driving sales and customer loyalty, it's crucial to ensure that your eCommerce checkout is strategically crafted to engage shoppers. In this article, we provide actionable tips to enhance your payment page performance, ultimately turning ordinary website visitors into devoted and repeat customers.

1. Enhance payment page design

Improving the layout of your payment page can significantly boost your conversion rates while reinforce brand loyalty. This can be achieved by using simple language, clear instructions, and concise labels, thereby creating a more seamless payment experience. It's also vital to streamline your checkout by placing the payment button prominently at the bottom and arranging information fields into one or two columns. This can also mean eliminating unnecessary footers and headers to keep the focus on completing the payment. Removing navigation menus or replacing them with shipping-related information can reduce cart abandonment rates and increase conversions.

Below we outline some key strategies to consider when designing your payment page:

Maintain brand consistency

Creating a familiar experience that resonates with the overall aesthetic of your eCommerce store can instil a sense of trust and reliability in your prospects and customers.

To retain your brand identity at checkout, consider focusing on the following:

• Logo: Your business logo serves as a key identifier for your brand, so make sure it's prominently displayed during the checkout process.

• Fonts: If your brand has a unique font style, incorporate it into your checkout pages and across all other pages to keep it all consistent.

• Colours and branding: Utilise the same colour palette and branding elements as your eCommerce store to establish a sense of familiarity. This consistency can contribute to a cohesive user experience and foster trust in your brand.

Prioritise a mobile-friendly checkout page

Based on a study conducted by Statista, it's projected that digital wallet payments will comprise 53% of eCommerce transactions volume worldwide by 2025. This indicates that adapts your checkout process to mobile devices is essential to capitalise on this growing trend.

Optimising for mobile devices involves various aspects, such as ensuring fast loading speeds, using clickable buttons, and deploying large fonts. Additionally, implementing a responsive layout that adjusts page contents for different screen sizes is vital for enhancing the mobile checkout experience.

2. Streamline checkout forms

Having an excessive number of checkboxes and required fields during checkout can lead to a time-consuming and cumbersome process. This, in turn, can discourage customers from completing their purchase. Research by the Baymard Institute shows that nearly 22% of consumers abandon their online purchases due to lengthy checkout processes. Streamlining the payment form by reducing the number of required fields can facilitate a smoother and quicker checkout experience for customers.

For card transactions, the necessary fields typically include the following

• Cardholder's name

• Card number

• Expiration date

• CVV/CVC (Card Verification Value/Code)

To simplify the checkout process, consider consolidating the fields for the customer's full name into a single required field, rather than separating them into first and last name sections. Additionally, providing an option for customers to indicate if their billing address matches their shipping address can further reduce the number of required fields.

Furthermore, implementing completion markers or a visual progress bar in checkout sections can allow users to estimate how many steps are left until payment completion, thereby improving conversions. By reducing the length of the checkout form and minimising required fields, businesses can encourage potential customers to make quick purchases, reducing cart abandonment rates and generating new revenue streams.

3. Accept your customers' preferred payment solutions

Providing customers with a range of payment options can significantly enhance a business's sales and profitability. Such payment methods can include traditional means of payments but also alternative payment options, such as digital wallets, bank transfers, voucher-based payments, direct debit, prepaid cards, and Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services to name a few. This can help justify why seven in ten (70%) of digital buyers prefer to complete transactions when their preferred payment method is available at checkout.

It's worth noting that these payment solutions may differ depending on the type of purchase and the customer's location. For instance, offering iDEAL for customers in Denmark or girocard for customers in Germany can be advantageous. In the UK, Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services are becoming increasingly popular, with 50% of consumers favouring them for their convenience.

In other markets like LATAM, PIX is a popular bank transfer option in Brazil, processing 24 billion transactions amounting to US$243 billion in 2022. Similarly, in Mexico, nearly a quarter (20%) of online transactions are made using the OXXO voucher payment option.

By providing locally preferred payment solutions, businesses can facilitate smoother transactions for their customers. This not only enhances sales and conversions but also fosters customer loyalty and strengthens brand trust.

4. Enhance customer confidence with secure payment practices

When making online purchases, customers prioritise the security of their personal and financial information. According to the Baymard Institute, 18% of consumers express discomfort with sharing payment details on eCommerce platforms.

To reassure customers of your website's security, displaying a security badge near the payment button is essential. Additionally, having an SSL Certificate encrypts cardholder data during transmission, indicated by a URL starting with https://, signalling a secure connection. While the article doesn't delve into specifics, merchants must take various actions to safeguard their websites from cyber attacks.

Selecting a payment service provider with a secure payment gateway is crucial for seamless and protected transactions. Ideally, partnering with a PCI level 1 compliant provider reduces PCI costs and ensures cardholder data outsourcing, enhancing security. Integration solutions, like 3D Secure 2 (3DS2), offer two-factor authentication to mitigate payment fraud and safeguard revenue.

Implementing these security features not only assures customers but also fosters trust in your business, enhancing customer confidence and loyalty.

5. Enable seamless purchases with one-click payments

Implementing one-click payments can significantly improve the checkout experience for eCommerce customers, ultimately boosting conversion rates. With this feature, customers can go past the hassle of re-entering payment details after their initial purchase, streamlining the buying process.

By securely storing customer information and utilising tokenisation, eCommerce platforms can offer returning customers the convenience of completing transactions with just a single click. This not only enhances security but also fosters customer loyalty by providing a frictionless purchasing journey. eCommerce businesses can collaborate with their payment service provider to integrate one-click payment functionality, thereby simplifying the checkout process and encouraging repeat purchases.

Conclusion

In the rapidly-paced world of eCommerce, improving your payment page is key for maximising conversions and driving customer loyalty. Research highlights the potential for significant conversion rate increases with a well-designed payment page.

By implementing strategies such as enhancing design, streamlining checkout forms, offering diverse payment options, ensuring security, and enabling one-click payments, businesses can create a frictionless shopping experience that delights customers and drives growth. Embracing these tactics positions businesses to thrive in the dynamic eCommerce landscape, delivering value to both customers and the bottom line.