A customer comes to a store to buy a phone and eventually collects a full basket of goods. In online retail, this pattern works if e-tailers make use of best practice trade tactics. In this article, Bilderlings Pay discusses methods of increasing e-commerce conversions, including cross-selling and one-click purchasing.
There are three main types of purchase: primary, repeat and impulse. Of course, the strategy of attracting primary customers is the most difficult and costly. Before buying anything in your online store, a client needs at least to know its name, to trust you, and, most importantly, to pay for the purchase and receive the goods with your guarantee.
Cross-selling is another way to increase profits. The development of cross-selling is an e-commerce tactic aimed at increasing the quantity and total value of the goods in a customer’s basket in addition to the product that was the main purpose of the purchase.
Methods of increasing sales
- Customer personalization
The effect of messaging to potential buyers is enhanced when they receive personalized messages. Elementary psychology is at work here: people pay more attention to those who address them by name, as previously discussed by Bilderlings Pay. Ideally, offers to buy related products should use the second-person pronouns “you” and “your”. This leads buyers to think of the goods they’re viewing on the website as already their own property.
- Buyer motivation
Personalization makes a purchase much more likely, but this does not mean that the customer will complete the payment process. It is worth using social proof. Like, for example, such marketplaces as AliExpress, Amazon, GearBest use on their websites: together with the primary target product, customers see pop-up clickable windows with related products. If shopping from a smartphone, they will see headphones, selfie sticks, batteries, cases, etc.
- The idea of social persuasion
Often buyers don’t know what else they need when making a large and expensive purchase in an online store. Therefore, pop-ups on your website with similar and related products, as well as messages like “customers who bought this item also bought…” will be appropriate.
With the help of online incentive programs you can encourage customer loyalty with extra points when these items are purchased together. If you sell shoes, you can give bonus points for buying laces. But the accompanying goods must be relevant. If you offer shoes or hygiene products together with smartphones, that would be a mistake, as these are unrelated or random products. Memory cards, covers, chargers, protective glass, screen insurance, a Bluetooth-headset or selfie stick are much closer to the focus basket.
Important: as a rule, before confirming a transaction, almost all buyers check their basket and estimate the total cost of all purchases. The e-tailer should show the small prices of all accompanying products, so that the buyer can successfully complete the transaction.
Here and now purchases
According to a poll by Mobile Commerce Daily, 21% of online shoppers said they made impulse purchases because they were encouraged by trading applications; another 22% indicated that they made their purchases because of the offers they saw on social networks; and 20% bought unplanned items because of messages received from the seller. Reacting to special offers that promise benefits, the consumer will tend toward buying an item, yielding to the emotional impulse.
For marketers, impulses are psychological triggers that make it possible to “anchor” customers through a combination of higher perceived value and relevance, urgency, scarcity, and finally, perhaps, the lowest price among analogues or similar products.
Payment, in fact, is the most crucial moment of the purchase and sale transaction. Here the main thing is to simplify the process, which can be cut to just several seconds. Technically it is simple to set it up on e-commerce sites that accept Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and other payment systems. The client enters the full details of his payment card only when making the first purchase. For all subsequent purchases, he simply has to click the “Pay” button.
As Bilderlings Pay previously reported, seamlessness and imperceptibility are among the main criteria for increasing conversion in trade. If buyers have to fill out a lot of fields with information about themselves each time they come to make a purchase in an online store, this will reduce business profitability indicators. Ideally, e-tailers should use the simple and convenient functions of auto-complete forms wherever possible, without compromising the security of purchases.
For repeated purchases the client from your customer base has to enter the CVC/CVV code on his payment card, that is the last three digits on the back of the card, then click the “Pay” button and go through 3D Secure authorization.
One-click transactions
“Payments in one click” – an ideal tool for the easy and almost invisible purchase. Advantages here are not only the speed of payment, but also in increasing buyer loyalty. One-click payments are the norm in modern online trading.
The areas of application for one-click payments, as Bilderlings Pay has already described, are one-time payments which are made after the purchase, and recurring or regular automatic payments used, for example, when paying for telecommunications and utilities services or for regular purchases of goods.
A one-click payment system isn’t a surprise to consumers nowadays. Nevertheless, a good website should provide a clear explanation of the process for primary customers, so that they’re not likely to feel mistrust or suspicion, along the lines of: “I did not give you my data, why has a payment been made?!”
It’s important that one-click payments are available from all linked devices of the same client, like a computer and a smartphone. It should be noted that when choosing a processing company, the e-tailer should pay special attention to security issues (the company must have a PCI DSS certificate) and the smooth operation of the fraud monitoring system.
Let your buyers make their payments as easily and smoothly as possible. If they are satisfied, they will keep coming back to you again and again.
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