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I’m sure your eCommerce site accepts credit cards. Visa, Mastercard and Amex are the top three.
But do you also accept PayPal? As well as PayPal Express Checkout? If not, you might be missing out on a big customer segment.
Standard Credit Card Checkout:
A user goes through the standard checkout process, and adds their shipping and billing address, as well as their credit card information into the secure form. Payment happens in the background, and is transparent to the end user.
PayPal:
PayPal: Standard PayPal transactions work when someone goes through your shopping cart, and at the end (after filling in their shipping information), they click on a button to pay via PayPal. The user is then taken to a PayPal login page, where the user can login with their email address and password. The user can then select payment options (such as paying via a bank account or a credit card). To confirm the order, the user is usually redirected back to the original site, and clicks to confirm that the order is valid.
PayPal Express Checkout:
Instead of giving the site all of your information (i.e. your email address, billing address, shipping address and payment information), they click on a link on the cart page to go to the PayPal Express Checkout link. Then, the user is taken to a PayPal login page, and PayPal then sends the required information over to the Website, so that the user doesn’t have to fill it out. PayPal Express Checkout requires a bit of additional integration and testing, but it makes it quick, fast and easy for a customer to part with their money and place an order.
Payment Options Not to Worry About:
– Google Checkout. The only reason to do this used to be that you were able to get a special icon next to your CPC advertisements. But hardly anyone is using Google Checkout these days, and it’s one more thing that can go wrong with your site.
– Pay By Check. Most customers are wary (and rightly so) about giving out their checking account information to a website. Again, unless your site is doing hundreds of orders a day, don’t worry about this.
– Bill Me Later. If your site has really high-dollar ticket items, this might be worthwhile to explore. But if your average order is $25, you probably don’t want to pay the finance charges for small ticket amounts.
– Foreign Credit Cards. If you do a lot of business in a specific country (i.e. Brazil or China), then go ahead and put in a payment method specific to that country. However, most people placing an order on an international site are happy to pay via Visa or MasterCard.
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