Payment friction is one of the main reasons customers leave an e-commerce site empty handed. As such, merchants need to make payment as seamless and easy as possible.
"Payments must be simple, convenient and fast. We need to reduce the pain that we put a consumer through when making a payment," said Dougie Henderson, head of emerging products and innovation for Visa Africa during his keynote address on the opening morning of the eCommerce Africa Confex in Cape Town today.
"Consistency is an essential element of ecommerce - consistent security, consistent availability and consistent service," he stressed. "Abandonment is every merchant's worst nightmare. Consistent procurement standards are the cornerstone of successful e-commerce today."
For Henderson, one the best ways to guard against abandonment is to provide consumers with a dependable and user-friendly experience. In order to do so, online merchants must provide a reliable ecosystem that is accessible and looks the same across multiple devices and platforms, he continued. "Providing a consistent user experience comes down to retaining the relationship you have with your customers."
In line with this, Henderson outlined the importance of familiarity; pointing out that customers feel uncomfortable and tend to abandon their baskets when their online shopping experience sees them being redirected to a page they are unfamiliar with.
While he did admit mobile should be the focus of any online merchant, he highlighted that mobile transactions amplify conversion friction. The problem with these poor mobile conversion rates is that they are evidence of missed opportunities, particularly when one points out m-commerce is growing at seven times the pace of e-commerce. "Again, it comes down to consistency. One of the biggest detractors in the mobile transaction world today is a lack of consistency because mobile platforms tend to differ quite drastically from a desktop experience," he further stressed.
Online merchants must provide an "omni-connected world" by making their offering available across various platforms and in doing so they can ensure that their customers have the kind of experience they want to have.
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