As you prepare to open the doors for this peak sales season, is your eCommerce presence equipped to handle the rush? In 2020, Black Friday became Australia's most popular sales event, beating out the Boxing Day sales1. In 2021 this trend continued, especially on the eCommerce side, with more and more shoppers avoiding the crowds, to drive the biggest November on record for online shopping.
This trend presents a massive opportunity for eCommerce retailers, but it comes with an important condition.
Your payment set-up must be optimised and robust enough to handle the extra pressure. Your choice of payments processor can make a critical difference, ensuring you're equipped with the resources, security and uptime needed to convert all that extra traffic.
Peak selling success begins with your payment processor.
Your success during peak online selling season comes down to two essential factors – user experience (UX) and conversion.
When you think about your brand’s UX, is the journey from product selection to checking out as seamless as possible?
Does the customer have to enter data multiple times (around 50% of eCommerce websites will ask for the same info twice)?
Does the customer have to go to a separate page to calculate shipping?
Are there hidden charges at the checkout?
Finally, can the customer pay any way they want – via debit, credit, PayPal, or newer payment methods like Alipay, WeChat and UnionPay?
All of the above create points of friction, leading to lost sales or, worse yet, the loss of loyal customers.
Your choice of ‘Payment Gateway’, which allows your online checkout to take payments, has a major impact on reducing friction. And ensuring conversion.
Till’s Online Checkout was conceived with friction-free payments in mind and an online checkout process that is simple, easy and intuitive.
Seamless, simple integrations to let you offer a broad range of payment types, so customers can pay the way they prefer.
More intelligent inventory management
(and many more business efficiencies!)
Peak selling time comes with logistical challenges – not helped by labour shortages and recent supply chain issues.
You can better allocate stock to meet demand and shorten delivery times with smarter inventory management. You can realise all kinds of new efficiencies.
But there’s a problem.
Small to medium-sized businesses in Australia find it harder to tap into payments data – something larger competitors have been doing for years.
So, where do you find the right digital tools to enhance business ops?
The Till Merchant Portal displays all payment data in one place, saving hours on reconciliations every week. It also makes managing credit card payments much more effortless and minimises costs due to manual errors and chargebacks.
With Till Portal (Unified Commerce), your payment system can be seamlessly (and painlessly) integrated with inventory, CRM, ERP, email marketing and other business systems. You have all payment data from all channels on one platform, packed full of potential insights – such as what types of promotions to offer, when, and what channels to use. From presenting initial offers and building site traffic to following up on abandoned carts, clever use of payment data can help you deliver the right message at just the right time for maximum sales impact.
Securing customer payment data (and your reputation)
The more online transactions you process, the more customer data you collect – and the more you become a target for cybercriminals.
It’s critical your make sure all that data is protected. Data protection is a major headache and expense for any small to medium business – unless your payment provider can take it off your hands.
As well as making you automatically compliant with the relevant security standards, Online Checkout provides tokenisation, which securely ‘masks’ credit card information. Customer credit card data is safely stored in Till’s Secure Card Vault and protected by Till’s Secure Authorisations until needed for another payment. Customers can make repeat purchases without re-entering their credit card details, helping you close more sales in peak purchase periods and beyond. While keeping your customers' data safe and your business reputation intact.
In conclusion, the right payment provider will ensure your business has the resources, security and uptime needed – without the technical hassle. With Till, you have a payment partner who ticks all the boxes, laying the groundwork to take your eCommerce business to the next level.
If you’d like to know more, chat with a member of the Till Force to see how we can help you succeed this peak sales season. Or click through to discover how our all-in-one online payments solution can help you supercharge your eCommerce storefront