Never lose a customer for want of payment options
Picture this: You have scoured the earth for that dream product with the exact fit and features. You finally found the product of your dreams on a multi channel ecommerce. Being a regular visitor to ecommerce websites, you place the order, only to lose out on the purchase all because the online store would not accept the mode of payment you want to offer. Could there be a more disappointing online shopping experience? For the business, too, it is an incalculable loss when a customer who has zeroed in on it has to back off without making the purchase. What should have otherwise resulted in the best word-of-mouth publicity could well end up being the exact opposite.
More options, more sales
Payment options are one of the less thought about aspects of an online business. Most ecommerce business solutions that do a wonderful job of making their ecommerce website design delightfully feature-packed suffer from the major deficiency of offering limited payment options. Often, it is not their own fault, because they are advised to the contrary by the backend operator who has offered it its ecommerce software. One of the common reasons for this is the ecommerce solutions’ payment gateway’s inability to accommodate different modes of payment.
Small deterrent
Another important reason for which online businesses do not offer more modes of payment is that having these costs them. True, payment gateways charge a sum for this service, but any businessman would think of ROI first. The fee is small in relation to the increase the business can have by allowing this option. Suppose a gateway charged £50 a month, what is it compared to the hundreds of pounds of business the site enabled with this feature brings?
Check at the start of the business
Online businesses have to check with their provider if their ecommerce shopping software is capable of accommodating different payment options. The best ecommerce software for you in this context is one that is able to offer software that integrates varied payment options such as cash on delivery (although not many online stores offer this), cheque, debit card, gift cards, postal money order, reverse SMS billing to mobile phones, various types of electronic money and wire transfer/delivery on payment. It is always a great idea to ensure all this at the time of the start of the business. Some service providers do not have the flexibility needed for accommodating more options as the business grows. An ecommerce provider like http://www.nichesuite.com/ facilitates flexible multiple payment options in addition to having important features like online shopping cart software.
In sum, having a flexible ecommerce provider is the solution to retaining customers and growing business. This is too good a business proposition to be lost in the folly of thinking of the few bucks it costs to enable this.
References:
http://www.ecommercetrends.com/payment-options-can-increase-your-cash-flow/
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