3 Payment Lessons for New Online Retailers

In today’s world if your business is not sailing upstream with technology, then you are probably being thrown away behind in the market race such that nobody knows about you.
 

The market ruler, Bill Gates has correctly said that “If your business is not on the Internet, then it will be out of business.”
 

Starting a business might seem easy, but as much as the success of your online business sounds satisfying, it involves even more hard work and many lessons to be learnt.
 

Businesses often spend a lot of money and then understand the facts in the course of success of their online business. But it is also important to tell a great story and present your online retail store in an eye-catching manner for higher conversions.
 

In the words of Seth Godin, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories you tell.”
 

E-commerce business has a lot to offer, but it also involves many challenges in trying to grow, sustain and manage it. As a business owner, you might have many ideas related to setting up your online store, but you might not be skilled in everything.
 

Though customer satisfaction remains the top priority for any business, an online retail store demands other accessible features like an easy payment option, quick checkout process, smooth product search etc.
 

And practically nobody loves to shop from an online store that makes customers wait long for a payment to take place and complete ease. So, there are many things that you need to know when stepping into the eCommerce world, especially if you are a new retailer.
 

However, the neglect of these factors invites trouble for even high grown businesses as it may lead to business-critical financial implications that they might not have already prepared for.   
 

So, online retailers must not neglect payment related issues in the eCommerce market as it can cost them customers and revenues. Most of all it can be a difference between the success and failure of a new online retail store.
 

But you at the right place, as we bring 3 Payment Lessons for New Online Retailers, that new starters must swear by:
 

One of the biggest problems faced by online retail stores is shopping cart abandonment. If you are facing increased shopping cart abandonment by your customers, you are losing revenue and need to look at the things that are going wrong in the process. There are chances that things may be going wrong in your checkout process.  
 

According to Seth Godin,

“In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.”
 

So as an online retailer, you must always try to make your shopping experience easier from the customer’s point of view. Because most of the online shoppers are using mobile devices, make sure your online portal is adequately optimized for such devices.
 

Since shopping cart abandonment is stealing your sales, pay attention in simplifying the checkout process as much as possible so that the customer does not need to go through a bundle of tasks in order to make a purchase from your store.  
 

Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com says,

“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
 

Image Source: Conversio
 

Online retailing involves a lot of transfer of funds, including the ones that the customer transfers to your business for a purchase and others such as chargebacks. Chargebacks are the reverse transfer of funds from your account back to the customer’s account.
 

These may be on account of customer dissatisfaction, product disapproval, fraud customer practices etc. These chargebacks are not only taking the money that you earned back from you but also includes some extra fee at times.
 

These reverse transactions are something that every online retailer must deal with to protect their businesses. The best thing to do is to stop them from happening at the first place. It is advised to keep a merchant record so that you can keep a track of these activities and save a considerable amount of money from flowing back.
 

A must for new online retailers is to keep a merchant record of all online transaction activities. In other words, if you want to save your business from fraudulent practices you need to keep a track of all customer and seller transactions that also include any tax or credit fees involved in the transactions.
 

This way you are saving the risks and frauds that may come across your ecommerce business. Market experts also advise on using payment providers that also serve your business by keeping a Merchant of Records. This is more than ever important for the online retailers.

“eCommerce leaders will have to keep with these changes (and others) to survive and stay ahead.”- Linda Bustos, Ecommerce Expert from Get Elastic.

Thus, monitoring these records can easily help any business identify the cause of reverse transactions and help them work for betterment accordingly.

“Because of the increased use of social media on smartphones and social media’s involvement in retail sales, “social selling” has become red hot. Anyone hoping to improve their online sales success must take advantage of emerging trends.”- Eddie Machaalani, co-founder and co-CEO, Bigcommerce

Thus, payment can play a vital role in deciding the success of your new online retail store. And a strong and smart entrepreneur must have the power to look beyond selling the products and pay attention to the actual portal and the system that is forming the basis of their online store.
 

It thus becomes important to not just limit your understanding as a product seller, but also come up and dig into the payment system to see how it works for the customer.
 

As Japanese business executive, Yasuhiro Fukushima has said, “Thus, in the future, instead of buying bananas in a grocery store, you could go pick them off a tree in a virtual jungle.”
 

Make sure that the customer gets these bananas most easily accessible on a tree in your online store.