E-commerce is a valuable tool for connecting your business with the online world. Of course, if done incorrectly, it can be complicated and confusing which diminishes its immense potential for business growth and profit. A large component of a properly managed ecommerce is ensuring your payment process is optimized.
As ecommerce rapidly expands, the basics can easily be forgotten. Yet, the implementation of the basics, particularly integrating online payments, is essential to receive the full benefits of your online store.
1. Selecting the Right Payment Options
Setting up and updating your ecommerce follows a cycle of phases. The first step is to identify the goal of your ecommerce and payment systems, which can be very different depending on the type of business you have. Some businesses or industries require a complex payment integration while others require a relatively simple process. Selecting a payment integration that corresponds to your transaction volume and speed is essential to maintain a reliable checkout process for your customers and your business.
In addition, during this step, you are also focusing on aligning your software and internal systems, finding your target buyers, and identifying what your payment structures must look like. Below are a few questions to assist in identifying what needs your ecommerce requires.
- Is your aim to gain new clients, retain existing clients, or a combination of both?
- How is your sales team affected by digital sales? Should there be a compensation change?
- What type of order system will be visible on our end Vs. what the client will be able to see?
- How should the order system differ between the customers’ view and the internal view?
By answering these questions, it outlines what functions your company needs now and what add-ons can be included later.
2. Improving Your Customer Experience
After defining your needs, it is time to customize your systems. With a functioning ecommerce in place, the next step is to improve the customer experience. Through options such as live chats, shipment tracking, order histories, product recommendations, calendar-based automated ordering, and much more, your ecommerce store can personalize the customer experience. Overall, these payment features make your ecommerce store more convenient, comprehensive, and specific to the individual customer.
To develop such customization and make improvements to the customer experience, you must learn more about your customers and their expectations, needs, and relation to your ecommerce store. This step allows your business to make the interaction more meaningful than simply placing an order, instead, it becomes a valued asset to your business.
3. Adding Automation Based On Customer Patterns
Once you have created a responsive and systematic experience for your clients, the next step is to implement automation for faster and more reliable service. This step is heavily reliant on understanding your customers’ needs and usage of your services to determine how their data translates to the experiences they desire. Using customer data from online purchases and interactions will allow automation to make predictions about future needs, how they respond to specific advertisements or marketing campaigns, and how to effectively personalize their online experience.
In order to create these analytics, it is important to map the client’s journey, or each touchpoint, with your brand from the beginning. Building a journey map of your clients shows how their needs shift with growth and how to anticipate these changes.
And last, as your business continues to collect data to improve targeting, test new features, and enhance the customized experience, your payment systems should operate with future needs already capable.
To learn more about selecting the right payment option for your ecommerce store or how to increase your customer experience, get in touch with the Evolve Payment team!