Small businesses need to focus on improving the online payment experience their online stores offer. Setting up a better, more personalized payment experience can help you increase conversions and grow your bottom line.
In this article, we willl show you different ways to improve your business’s online payment experience by using WooCommerce plugins.
The default WooCommerce payment experience
As an online store owner, you are probably familiar with the default WooCommerce payment experience.
It goes something like this: customers browse through your product catalog and add products to their shopping cart. They can then review the items added to their cart and proceed to the checkout page. Finally, the customer selects a payment gateway and places their order.
The default WooCommerce payment experience is pretty standard and doesn’t offer a personalized payment experience. This means that you can’t tweak it to better fit the types of products you’re selling or the customers you’re selling them to.
In addition to this, there’s no real way of charging extra fees for the different payment gateways you offer on your WooCommerce store. This means that if a payment processor is charging you additional costs for each order, you cannot pass them onto your customers.
With the default WooCommerce payment experience, you can’t show or hide payment gateways based on the customer’s cart value. Ideally, you want to hide or display payment methods for different types of products on your eCommerce store. For instance, you might want to configure it so only your staff members can purchase products using the Bank Transfer payment method when ordering specific products from your WooCommerce store.
The default WooCommerce payment experience certainly has room for improvement. Next, we’ll step through some different ways you can enhance it to deliver a better user experience.
3 ways to improve small businesses online payment experience with WooCommerce plugins
Let’s take a look at different ways you can improve small businesses’ online payment experience using WooCommerce plugins.
#1: Make it easier for customers to pay you
It’s important to make it easy for customers to pay you for their orders. This not only helps increase sales but also is a great way to sell to more customers and grow your customer base.
One way to do this is by adding multiple payment gateways to your WooCommerce store. By adding a local or a custom payment gateway to your online store, you can enhance the user experience for local buyers. This way, you attract new site visitors and boost engagement on your WooCommerce store.
For instance, local customers will be incentivized to buy from you as it may be more convenient for them to use local payment gateways. This can help your brand gain exposure in the local market and creates a unique brand experience for customers shopping on your eCommerce store.
Stores that sell a lot of different products and product variations should consider enabling different payment gateways for different types of products. For example, expensive jewelry products or custom furniture usually isn’t sold with payment options such as cash on delivery. You need a way to let customers pay in advance through different payment options such as direct bank transfer or PayPal. This makes it easier for you to prepare their orders without running into payment issues with customers later on.
#2: Create a personalized payment experience
Creating a personalized payment experience for customers on your WooCommerce store goes a long way. It not only incentivizes customers to buy from your store but also helps improve brand loyalty.
One way of doing this is by offering a region-specific payment gateway on your WooCommerce store. This is great for WooCommerce stores that sell globally to all types of customers, from various regions of the world. For instance, if your store deals with a lot of EU-specific customers, offering an EU-specific payment gateway can incentivize EU customers to buy more from you. In addition to this, you can still offer the default payment gateways for all other international customers.
You can also personalize the WooCommerce payment experience by offering different payment gateways for different currencies on your eCommerce store. This can be a great way to accept your preferred currency for each payment method available on your WooCommerce store. For instance, let’s say you have to pay additional costs in currency exchanges when international customers choose the direct bank transfer method. You can prevent such costs by offering the payment method for your preferred currency. Additionally, you can also restrict customers from using certain payment methods that don’t make sense. For example, EU customers cannot use the local pickup option as it’s only available for US-based customers.
#3: Offer discounts on specific payment gateways
Offering discounts on specific payment gateways is a great way to encourage customers to use your preferred payment gateways. This incentivizes shoppers to select your preferred payment gateways so that they can avail themselves discounts on their orders.
One of the best ways of encouraging customers to buy more from you is by offering them discounts. Because of the discounts, customers might end up buying more from your online store than they had planned.
Offering customers discounts on specific payment gateways can help you increase conversion rates and attract more people to your store. For instance, you may offer customers a 3% discount for using your preferred payment vendor as the payment option. Since everyone wants to get the best price possible, more people will be willing to use that discounted payment gateway when placing orders through your eCommerce store.
Another neat strategy is to set the minimum and maximum amounts for payment gateways. This means that you can set the minimum number of items and the maximum allowed per customer for specific payment gateways.
For example, popular payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe charge a transaction fee for each order. The fee for large orders will be greater than for smaller orders. Setting a maximum limit for an order can prevent additional costs to your business. This way, you can maximize profits while delivering a good online payment experience to customers.
Conclusion
There are plenty of ways to enhance the online payment experience on your WooCommerce store.
To recap, you can:
- Make it easier for customers to pay you by adding multiple payment gateways and enabling different payment gateways for different types of products.
- Create personalized payment experiences by offering region-specific payment gateways and offering different payment gateways for different currencies.
- Offer discounts on selected payment gateways and set min/max amounts to maximize profits.
For more detailed reading and step-by-step instructions, you can take a look at our guide on how to enhance the WooCommerce payment experience.
Do you know of any other ways that can help small businesses improve their online payment experience with WooCommerce plugins? Let us know in the comments below.
Further reading
