Hey, welcome to this new edition of Digital Blitz, your quick brief on everything UX, Tech and Compliance. I'm here to help you deliver better experiences for your team and your customers.
So if you run your own e-commerce websites, how can you optimise your checkout experience?
Well, the first thing is security.
PCI Compliance
It's really the core consideration. PCI compliance dictates the rules to ensure that the customer credit card are stored and processed securely. So for most SMEs delegating the PCI requirements to a payment gateway is the recommended approach. You can just implement their code on your websites and let them deal with all the security and the hassles of all of that.
You should always review their fraud management services when selecting a payment gateway because you want a simpler process and peace of mind when those come.
Improve UX
Once the security is covered, you need to focus on conversions and think about optimizing the checkout and the payment flow. You don't want your customers having to spend too long, filling out all these forms and billing details, having to register remembering passwords... Especially with the rise of mobile and shopping on smaller screens, I feel like there's still too much friction and trust issues on a lot of websites.
So to get around that, you can give your customers options. The less you make them think the better the conversions will be.
It's really an interesting space to being right now because, with all the advances in technology, all the big players are providing amazing solutions from PayPal 0 years ago to AmazonPay, and now the mobile checkout options with ApplePay and GooglePay.
You can even provide financing to your customer, this "pay later" from Klarna or AfterPay. And maybe in a few years, we can even check out with cryptocurrency. Can you imagine that?
Custom checkout experiences
As you grow, you might want to start owning your customer record or owning the transaction and negotiating payment fees. The platform Stripe.com has been providing an amazing service, keeping everything very secure, giving developers lots of freedom to personalize the experience and provide additional features such as subscriptions.
If you're running on BigCommerce (and there are more platforms coming soon), there is a new player in town. The company fast.co has launched what they claim to be the world's fastest checkout. And no, they've not sponsored this article or video (I've had to buy this hoodie from them), but they're really going all-in to deliver the best checkout experiences. I've tried it a few times and you really have to check it out for yourself to believe it.
If you have any questions about optimising your checkout experience or integrating new payment methods, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.
Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.
