How Your E-commerce Business Can Benefit From Multiple Payment Options

If you’re an e-commerce business, it makes sense to make the checkout process as simple and seamless as possible for your customers. This means making the process intuitive, but it also means offering multiple payment gateways. Online businesses can benefit from multiple payment options in numerous ways. Whether you want to improve the customer experience or increase revenue, multiple payment options may be your solution. In this blog post, we’ll be taking a closer look at these benefits and talking about how you implement multiple payment options in your e-commerce business. Read on to learn more or schedule a demo with Dots to find out how you can add payout options for sellers in your marketplace.

A Quick Overview

First, a quick definition for payment gateways. Put simply, a payment gateway is a software application that allows digital payments to securely transfer from a payer to a payee. These portals are essential to the thriving e-commerce industry because it allows customers to purchase products and services digitally from these businesses. Payment gateways act as an intermediary between customers, merchants and payment processors. They make sure data stays secure and protected during a transaction. When a customer visits your e-commerce website and checks out, the payment gateway will verify the information, process the transaction, and provide a secure method of payment. Payment gateways are also important for fraud prevention and preventing scammers, as they prevent unauthorized transactions from going through. In short, e-commerce businesses wouldn’t be able to operate on the level they do without payment gateways. And by offering multiple gateway options, businesses give customers more ways to pay. Let’s dive deeper into why this is beneficial:

Improve Customer Experience

Using multiple payment gateways is a great way to improve the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction. Customers appreciate convenience and flexibility. Giving them more control over the way they pay will make the checkout experience more frictionless and enjoyable for them. Limited payment options can frustrate some customers. Not all customers want to pay the same way. Some prefer to pay with their credit cards while others may prefer a processor like PayPal or Venmo. Credit cards may offer customers points and perks. Digital wallets let customers finish transactions in seconds since their information is already saved. These small conveniences are enough to make a difference in the customer experience, encouraging them to become repeat customers and complete their transactions. Multiple payment gateways also provide customers with more flexible ways to pay. Some customers like to be able to put purchases on credit. Others like to be able to pay in installments. Some may prefer to pay in their local currency (if they’re shopping internationally) or pay with cryptocurrency. With multiple payment gateways, you can more easily accept all of these payment options.

Users Feel More Safe and Secure

While digital payments have changed the way businesses sell their products and services, customers still want to feel secure completing their payments. Since they’re entering their personal and financial information, they want to be sure it’s safe. Security and trust are essential if you want a customer to complete a purchase and come back to make purchases in the future. Using multiple payment gateways can give your customers more peace of mind. Since they have more flexibility with the way they pay, they can choose the payment gateway that they prefer and trust. For example, if a customer always likes to check out using PayPal, they’re going to feel safer seeing PayPal as a payment option on your website. It makes sense that customers would feel this way because many of these payment gateways come with built-in security features to keep their data safe. Many are equipped with fraud prevention and encryption technology. Not only does this protect the information of the customer, but it also protects your business from chargebacks and other fraud issues. In short, multiple payment gateways can reassure customers and create a more secure environment for them during the checkout process. This is another way to increase customer satisfaction, but it also helps your business be more secure and avoid fraudulent transactions. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Reach Customers in Different Countries

Multiple payment gateways make it much easier to do business in other countries. Not all payment methods are accepted in certain countries, so offering various options will ensure you’re covered in the places where people are shopping. You can ensure your customers can pay with their currency and choose their country’s preferred payment method. Not only does this make the checkout process easier for your international customers, but it also allows you to greatly expand your reach and tap into these international markets. Many payment gateways can automatically take care of currency conversion, saving you from having to deal with compliant payment workflows and currency conversion fees. It’s much more convenient to let these payment gateways take care of currency conversions, so you don’t have to. The previously built-in security measures are also useful for selling internationally. If you open your business up to numerous countries, you may increase your risk of fraud. With multiple payment gateways with security measures and encryption, you can minimize your risk. Additionally, these countries may have their own payment regulations and compliance measures. With multiple payment gateways implemented, you can automate these compliance issues and not have to worry about dealing with fines and other penalties. If you’re able to sell your products and services internationally, there’s no reason you shouldn’t try to expand your business to these markets. The e-commerce industry and digital payments have made it possible for even small businesses to reach a global audience. If you have the capacity to sell internationally, multiple payment gateways will enable you to do it as easily and efficiently as possible.

Increase Your Conversions

All of the above factors lead to one major benefit that any e-commerce business can get behind - increased conversions. When customers have a better experience, feel secure, and can shop from nearly anywhere, you’re going to be able to increase your bottom line and bring in more revenue. It’s all too easy for a business to get a customer into the sales funnel, but they can lose them at many steps in the sales journey. The last thing an e-commerce business wants to do is make it more difficult for a customer to complete that sales journey and convert. When customers have multiple payment gateways to access, they’ll be able to complete that final step much more efficiently and have less time to hesitate. Of course, e-commerce business owners are also well aware of how much it can cost to get customers to enter the sales funnel. Marketing costs and investment into the other steps of the sales funnel are all significant expenses. You want those expenses to lead to conversions, and multiple payment gateways can help increase that conversion rate, saving you money and time. Going back to our example of international customers, imagine if they’ve gone through every step up to the checkout process. They’re ready to make their purchase, but your business doesn’t accept the only payment method they have. This is a lost sale that you likely won’t get back. Having multiple payment gateways will prevent scenarios like this from happening. While multiple payment options won’t guarantee a purchase, they won’t hurt your chances. If you want to increase your conversions and boost your sales, it makes sense to make the customer checkout process as frictionless as possible. You don’t want to give them any reason to leave the checkout page and miss out on their business. Multiple payment gateways make the checkout process simpler for the customer, which can help increase conversions and sales. It also means you can simultaneously increase customer loyalty by providing them with a checkout process that works for them.

Reduce Cart Abandonment Rate

As we talked about in the last point, e-commerce businesses spend a lot of money perfecting their sales funnel and the customer journey. One of the worst metrics to see is a high cart abandonment rate. This is one of the metrics that stings the most because it means the customer was just a few clicks away from completing their purchase. It can be incredibly frustrating for businesses, especially when they invest time and money without seeing the rate decrease. Using multiple payment gateways is one way you can help reduce the cart abandonment rate. All of the above points play into a customer’s decision to complete a purchase. Let’s review: Improve customer experience - Customers don’t want barriers when checking out. They want the experience to be simple and convenient. Online shopping should make everything easier, and multiple payment gateways ensure customers can pay however they want. Users feel safer and more secure - Payment gateways have built-in security measures in place, like encryption and anti-fraud detection. Customers that are familiar with a payment gateway will automatically feel safer and secure knowing they can check out using that option. Instead of worrying if their data is safe, they’ll see their favorite payment option and simply click through to complete the transaction. No second-guessing is involved. Reach customers in different countries - Customers in other countries have preferred ways to pay too. If you’re making it difficult for them to pay, you’re going to get a lot more abandoned carts in these areas. You should see which payment options those customers use most and make sure to offer it as an option during checkout. Increase conversions - Of course, if you’re getting more conversions, you’re going to have fewer abandoned carts. Multiple payment gateways make it as convenient as possible for a customer to convert, which reduces your abandoned cart rate overall. As you can see, there are many aspects of multiple payment gateways that can prevent a customer from abandoning their cart. Reducing your abandoned cart rate isn’t always an easy task, but you can create one less barrier to checkout by offering the payment gateways your customers use most. There are so many benefits to offering multiple payment gateways that far outweigh the downsides. You should still make sure to do your research to find out which payment gateways make the most sense for your business and your customers, but more options are generally preferable. If you’re a marketplace looking for more ways to pay your e-commerce sellers, Dots can help.

Get Started With Dots Today

Just as e-commerce customers prefer multiple payment options, marketplace sellers prefer to have multiple ways to get paid. If you’re a marketplace, you can easily implement multiple payout rails in your current infrastructure with our API. Dots makes it easy to implement the payout options that your sellers use most with just a single line of code. Interested in learning more about the Dots API and how it can improve your seller payout workflows? Schedule a demo today.