Optimizing the Customer Experience when paying online

Any business, no matter what size or type, needs to pay careful attention to the customer experience when they are asking individuals to visit their web site and pay online (whatever products or services they may be offering).  The focus should therefore be on giving the best possible customer experience and converting first-time visitors in particular to become happy and repeat customers. There are several ways in which businesses can improve things and in this brief article we will be looking at six of the most critical ones.

1. Every site needs to be easy to navigate. Fundamentally, any site structure should be what customer needs, not how the organization wants it to look like for internal purposes. Simple, clear and clean page design (with as little clutter as possible) focused on moving customers toward completion of their goal should be the focus.

2. Make it easy for the customer to pay. Many web sites offering products and/or services seem to be almost embarrassed to mention payment and both hide prices in obscure pages within the site and fail to give site browsers and easy way to check out. And there is no excuse for this approach today. If this is not available as a direct part of the web site design, a redirect or hosted page at which customers can view a bill digitally or make a payment in many ways is available from multiple sources.

3. Communicate product or service offers clearly. Companies need to use clear, concise wording to describe what they are offering. Once again, clear prices are critical, including any extra costs that may be applicable. If this is not the case site browsers are much more likely to abandon the site’s shopping cart (a massive problem for many organizations when they have already done so much work to get a customer so close to buying!).

4. Implement methods to improve your site conversion rate. Conversion rate is the measure how many browsers become buyers.  Conversion rates average 2.5%-3% but rates that reach 8% are not uncommon and some sites report conversion rates of even 20%. The very informative article "How To Sell More on the Web: 30 Tips To Increase Conversion Rates For An Ecommerce Site" will give you several ideas to improve your conversion rate.

5. Manage customers when they are about to abandon their shopping carts. By the time an organization has got a customer into its site shopping cart, they have done the hard work and need to close out with losing them at this last hurdle. Assuming the payment checkout experience has been designed to be a smooth and painless one, one extra step to be taken is to offer direct incentives if a customer still wants to abandon his or her purchase-this may be a further price decrease or more benefits or features (or even additional product or service).

6. Provide incentives to register (and come back). Even the most established web sites are struggling with increasing their goal of building a large pool of repeat customers. On average, it is estimated that 95-97% percent of those who visit sites on average never return, even when they have paid.  To prevent this, provide as much incentive as possible for customers to register so that future emails and alerts can be sent to visit the site again.

Summary

Ultimately, any businesses aiming to succeed online must rise above their resource constraints and strive to provide quality e-service. The above 6 actions sound easy to implement (and they are) but very few organizations bother to spend the time to do so. Any organization that takes the time and makes the above changes to their web site will therefore reap considerable commercial benefits.

Are emailed invoices just as good as digital ones?

Most people now believe that electronic invoicing offers significant advantages over paper-based processes (saving direct costs like printing an invoice, stamping an envelope and sending it in the mail etc and saving indirect costs such as lost invoices, late and missing cheques in the mail and often much more difficult reconciliation). However, there is not always agreement on what the term “electronic invoicing” actually means and in this brief article we will look at two very different kinds of e-invoicing-emailed invoices and digital invoices. These are often perceived to be similar and/or equivalent methods but, as we will see, they are actually quite different.

Emailed invoices

Sending an invoice via email is usually done these days by attaching the invoice as an Adobe PDF document. This allows the invoice to be sent cheaply and quickly to the recipient who can use a free product (Adobe Acrobat Reader) to open and view it. The simple idea here is that once the customer has reviewed the document (and even saved it to his or her hard drive) he or she can then pay it. In theory (especially in Business to Consumer or B2C markets) the invoice is not only sent out quickly (and at much lower costs than traditional invoicing methods) but means that the customer can send back a cheque or phone in a credit card payment within hours or just a few days (and well ahead of the latest date he or should could technically pay) thereby helping to accelerate merchant cash-flow. Unfortunately, although this works in some situations, the process is rarely this smooth and a number of problems can occur.

Firstly, the merchant needs to have a customer’s email address to be able to send a PDF. Secondly, the PDF is still a flat document which most customers will not only have to open, but will often print and put in a pile to deal with later, when they are ready (just like receiving the paper-based invoice in the mail). This means that the customer may wait as long as they did before to pay the invoice (assuming they do not lose their printed piece of paper in the meantime having deleted their original email). In addition to all of this, an emailed PDF does not encourage the customer to pay by electronic means any more than an invoice arriving in the mail does. Research suggests that customers actually often like to have the option to pay online by debit or credit card for example and can often only do so by calling the merchant (and having to spend time and effort, and within the hours of business operated by the call-centre). Finally, in Business to Business (or B2B) invoicing, the emailed PDF presents a whole new layer of challenges as these often require a digital signature. PDF technology is now much better at allowing digital signatures to be securely added to invoices when they are sent in the mail. However, the process is by no means simple and presents many logistical issues, particularly when multiple approval signatures are required.

Digital invoices

A digital invoice is available at a web site. Sometimes this is embedded in part of a merchant’s web site or it is “hosted” on a third-party web site (to which customers can go directly or can be redirected from a link on a merchant’s web site). In most cases, the digital invoice rendering process is even quicker than emailed invoices, as there is no need to generate a PDF and attach it to an email address. In addition, although a customer may be notified that a new invoice is available via email, it is not necessary to have an email address (as the customer can be notified about the web address by normal physical mail and then subscribe to the web site service to be later notified by either email or even their mobile phone –via SMS). In practice this means that digital invoices will often collect or “scrape” new email addresses from customers progressively.

Perhaps most importantly, a digital invoice is viewed in a truly online way (and does not require printing (as it can be easily stored and retrieved permanently or resent by a merchant at almost no extra cost). This means that not only can the customer view the invoice (in as much detail as they wish) but they can use many online features to both deal with the invoice (save it, schedule it for later payment or send it on for viewing or approval to another person) or even just pay it immediately of course. And if they do choose to pay it immediately, they typically get to do so via their debit card if they want to use their current bank account or by a variety of credit card options (and in some cases even by cash by printing out a voucher and taking it to a local newsagent or local store that takes cash payments). This is therefore much more likely to accelerate merchant cash-flow than in the emailed invoice situation and means that the payment is much easier to reconcile (as less difficult to reconcile cheques or phone-based payments are being made). Finally, the invoice recipient (whether it is a B2C one or B2B one) can elect to pay a bill 24/7 as the bill presentment and payment web site is truly “open-all-hours”.

Conclusion

Emailed invoices are superior to traditional invoices sent in the mail. However, they fall far short of full digital invoices, which offer many additional benefits (which translate into much greater time and cost saving for the merchant). These two approaches are therefore far from equivalent and a merchant can realise considerable advantages by upgrading from an emailed invoice to a full digital one.