The essentials of Mobile Payments
The days of going to a shop in order to buy something are already in the past. Today, you can purchase whatever you want from home, sipping a cup of your favorite coffee.
You just need to grab your smartphone and enjoy buying anything, anywhere in the world. As the annual Mobile Money Report says, mobile commerce, so-called m-commerce, is on the rise with 78% of consumers shopping using their mobile device. So unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you understand the incredible power of m-commerce and the need to build the whole purchase process not only for desktop, but also mobile.
However, many e-commerce websites and platforms, designed with desktop browsing experience, have failed to adjust it to mobile. In such case, they can kiss a huge deal of new sales goodbye.
M-commerce is definitely a huge opportunity for e-commerce. Before the popularity and omnipresence of smartphones, retailers had to wait till their potential customer finishes work, comes home and finally sits down at his or her computer, or walks into their store. They were powerless. Nowadays, it looks completely different. You can be available on the device people are literally glued to for five hours a day.
Although only 5% of the time is devoted to shopping directly on a website, more than half of mobile time is spent on social media, which is perfect for m-commerce marketing and currently, more and more rich in sales offers pops up while scrolling through the platform.
M-commerce is an opportunity to pull in big dollars, but it’s competitive. If you want to get your slice of this delicious pie, you need to keep your ear to the ground and remain on top of the cutting-edge mobile solutions, including the checkout process and payments.
Five m-commerce payments hacks
According to eMarketer, by 2021 mobile will constitute more than a half of all e-commerce sales.
Despite such an increase in the use of mobile, there are several wrinkles that kill the joy. They include cart abandonment due to too many steps needed to complete the purchase, too much information required in the form or problems with Internet connection, redirecting to other websites, loading time or other technical problems. Below, there are vital issues you need to perfect if you would like to welcome an nice stream of sales.
- Make sure your website works smoothly and seamlessly with mobile devices. Having users turning to anything but their desktop to do the shopping, means if they stumble upon your website, it is better to meet their expectations to browse through touch and purchase on a tablet or smartphone. Your website should be responsive, that’s without a doubt, but it isn’t enough. Each step made towards a payment has to be intuitive and almost invisible in the process, you don’t want such road hogs as poor shopping cart navigation or being forced to create an account to ruin the experience.
The checkout process is expected to be frictionless and what gives more friction than an endless stream of billing and shipping details you must fill in? What’s worse, it’s usually moving from one box to another manually, all within a small mobile screen. No wonder so many carts end up abandoned. A tight budget wouldn’t stop customers from throwing about as much as these forms.
On top of that, even if you have the most responsive and mobile-friendly website, you can go out from the mobile game because of the loading time. AliExpress did an experiment, in which they reduced loading time of their websites by 36%. It resulted in a 10.5% orders increase and a 27% new customers conversion rates increase. It proves that even if a website has a slight 2-3 seconds delay when loading on mobile device, you can forget about an m-commerce tycoon dream coming true. It is a powerful incentive to perfect your website, so it loads within seconds.
- Reduce the steps needed to complete a transaction. Clicking a gazillion of times, waiting for loading some external page you’ve been redirected to, circling around the product you want and not being able to just click and get it… You know the feeling, right? So don’t inundate your shoppers with such hurdles, spoil them with simplicity. Remember, mobile users usually do shopping on the go, when in a bus or during a lunch break. You want them to be able to complete the purchase in a few minutes, if you drag them through time-consuming process, they will simply abandon the cart. Even if you have high-quality products, there surely is someone with similar ones, available to be bought in seconds. M-commerce is ruthless when it comes to time and clicks. Limit redirections to an absolute minimum, so that the whole transaction happens within your site.
- Choose the best payment options for mobile. Making shopping easy is a step forward, but it’s only the first step. The key to conversion is making it easier to pay. Cash may have been the king once, but now the cashless empire is making it fade away. Although there is a variety of payment solutions on the market, your paramount criterion should be the ease and diversity of payments , so that you can fully cater to your customers and the mobile devices they use. In fact, presenting shoppers with an array of payment methods makes 40% of them more confident in your m-commerce. Apart from that, the lack of preferred payment method results in 59% of customers abandoning the ongoing transaction.
Source: Vouchercloud
The most popular mobile payment methods include credit cards, especially if the necessary details are saved and remembered after the first use. The best card processors/PSPs offer comprehensive and affordable credit card processing services and extra benefits. The best of the best (such as PayLane ;) are suitable for any type of m-commerce and flexible, so you can tailor them to your customers’ needs. Another payment option is e-wallet, offered by major players. E-wallets store customers’ authorization data in order to get a permission to perform a transaction and access goods, services or even places. It’s often based on NFC, so simply swiping a device allows you to make a purchase. This technology goes great guns especially in Asia, however, according to some reports, mobile wallets are expected to surpass both credit and debit cards by 2020.
What’s obsolete in m-commerce payment solutions? Well, that can raise some eyebrows, but old and not good anymore wire transfers are a deal-breaker in mobile. It’s rather impossible that an average smartphone user will type information into fields while running to the next meeting or lunch or while commuting somewhere. Swipe of a finger in e-wallets or a few taps to process a card are a far better option.
- Consider additional mobile payment options popular in particular markets. The world leader in mobile payments is Asia Pacific, with 53% of consumers paying via their smartphones. In contrast, North America has 33% and Europe 35%. The main drivers of such meteoric growth of mobile payments is the fact that the number of smartphones across Asia Pacific exceeds a billion. Young Asians are tech-savy, which triggers the development of mobile payment solutions. The most widely-spread is WeChat Pay and Alipay, which have made mobile payments mainstream. Now, they’re super apps, hosting consumer services, like shopping or chatting, including payments. Adding local (mobile) payment methods to your m-commerce payment systems sounds like a really good idea.
To further diversify m-payments and satisfy your customers, you can also explore mobile billing options. There is an array of companies specializing in mobile payments tied to mobile bills, there are in-app solutions, as well as SMS and website.
The more options your m-commerce has, the better the chance you will knock your customers’ socks off.
- Make offline payments possible. Anything can happen, a Wi-Fi suddenly goes down, a computer doesn’t work, a mobile can’t connect to a website. That’s why your m-commerce should have a plan B. The plan B are MOTO payments, explained here. It’s perfect for all those in technological trouble, but also for people appreciating their free time, vacationing in Bali or too busy at work to go through the payment on their own smartphone. Such facilitation won’t go unnoticed, and you won’t lose a client due to Internet access difficulties.
Creating an m-commerce that suits all is an impossible task. There will always be someone abandoning a cart without any reason, or choosing a different online store, just because there is a different one. It’s the consumers right to scroll down and click through to find what’s best for them.
However, there are 5 things you can do to reduce the risk of being abandoned or skipped. And they do not include all the bells and the whistles added to a website, they are about smooth and seamless payments.
With cutting-edge technologies you can cater to the most demanding smartphone users, offering them faster-than-light loading pages, intuitive and simple checkout, one-click payments, multiple m-payment options and even paying via MOTO. Embrace the mobile present and see how your business expands.
