How to create a great user experience across multiple channels

By Nick Tubb is Vice President, Commercial Affairs for Ingenico ePayments, 

The growing complexity of the consumer device ecosystem has resulted in customers interacting differently with retailers. Today, consumers choose to shop using smartphones, laptops, desktops, tablets and even wearable devices, posing new challenges for retailers looking to optimise e-commerce businesses’ checkout pages and increase conversions.

For this reason, online businesses should create a high performing user experience (UX) that is consistent across different channels. This is key for increasing conversions. Still, achieving this is difficult. Businesses need to understand how technology is changing and how consumers are choosing to use it.

Thankfully, there are some key considerations that these companies should take into account if they are going to optimise the consumer experience across multiple channels and increase conversions.

Understanding the basics of UX

UX is essential to preventing customers from dropping off. Businesses should first and foremost, understand the basics of UX. For example, checkout pages should be simplified, with alternative headers, to prevent the customer from being distracted and keep them focused on the payment process. What’s more, they should be designed in a way that makes it easy for customers to fill in. To do so, retailers should only ask customers for minimal information that is essential to complete the transaction.

In addition to this, eCommerce businesses can learn how to improve checkout pages across different platforms by analysing transaction data. Error codes are crucial for providing this type of insight. Retailers may find that most failed transactions had the same error code and make simple changes to prevent customers dropping off. For example, after investigating error codes, an online business may find that customers were entering ZIP codes incorrectly. In this case the retailer can make easy changes such as restricting the number of characters in the form field and only allowing numerical inputs to eliminate failed transactions.

Apps or checkout pages for mobile?

M-commerce is now a fundamental part of the shopping experience. Mobile payment methods – such as digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal – are rapidly increasing in popularity. So, how should businesses approach this payment method?

Often, payments through a native mobile app can be simpler and less cumbersome than on an organisation’s’ website. Yet, whether a user is buying through an app or through the mobile site, the checkout experience should be as frictionless as possible. Online businesses should ideally design checkout pages with a mobile-first methodology, testing these pages to ensure they work on multiple devices. Customers will not tolerate a checkout page that is not optimised correctly for the channel they are accessing it on.

Tokenisation will simplify the checkout process

One reason why customers abandon shopping carts is that checkout processes are too long and require them to input too much information. Tokenisation allows companies to remove this friction by storing customer credentials, preventing them from continuously inputting the same data over and over. The ideal is one-click purchasing, which allows customers to checkout with minimal effort. But again, consistency is key. Tokenisation should be offered across every channel.

Staying up to date with new technology

 For any retailer to be able to continuously increase conversions, it must first understand how technology is changing the way customers want to pay. Businesses must keep an eye on what new technologies are available to customers and how to optimise the UX using this technology.

Take, for example, conversational commerce, which is rapidly growing in popularity. Retailers must be able to reach consumers who are utilising this technology, or risk losing out. Still, if the checkout experience is not integrated seamlessly into this new channel, customers are unlikely to convert and will be driven away.

To understand how customers use these new technologies, and how that usage differs by region, businesses must have access to useful data. This way retailers can make informed, robust decisions about how to optimise the checkout experience, maximise conversions and grow revenue. To achieve this, these companies should turn to their payment service providers, who not only will be able to provide them with the data necessary to make these decisions, but also can help them build a consistent, frictionless and secure UX across multiple platforms.

If you want to know how to implement the most cutting-edge payments innovations, download our latest guide on Conversion Rate Optimisation.