Online spending in the 2020-21 financial year reached a record high of $52.1 billion, up 26.9% year-on-year. And that’s just in Australia alone.

But this online surge in shopping has created an online consumer with a long list of expectations: convenient, secure, and friction-free to briefly name a few.

For your online shopping experience to meet the needs of your potential customers, you have to look deeper than the standard marketing tricks and aesthetics of your online store.

You have to look at how you accept payments online, keep your customers’ information secure, and your payment processing.

This sounds more complicated than it is. In fact, in this article we’ll walk you through how you can easily tick all of these boxes — secure, convenient, and frictionless — so you can benefit from this surge in online spending

6 ways to create the best online experience for your customers

From the way you take customer payments, to the way you protect their information — here are six unexpected (but easy) ways to improve your online shopping experience.

1. Accept alternative payment options
   Different shoppers prefer different payment methods. Some like the familiarity of using a credit or debit card (which is still the most popular method in Australia), others prefer PayPal or using a digital wallet like Apple Pay.

There’s plenty of factors that play a role in cart abandonment; don’t let it be the fact that you don’t offer enough alternative payment options. If you don’t offer the payment method a customer prefers, they will be more likely to abandon their cart and take their business elsewhere.

Read more: Why your business should start accepting digital wallets

2. Get your business PCI DSS compliant
   If your business processes payment card information, it must meet the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). PCI DSS details the rules businesses must adhere to when processing, storing, and transmitting payment card information.
3. Enable login-free (guest checkout) payments
   First-time shoppers to your online store want a frictionless checkout experience. If you require an account to be created before they can checkout, you’re not delivering on this.The more steps a checkout has, the more opportunities they have to reconsider and abandon their cart. In fact, 24% of people abandon their online shopping cart because the site wanted them to create an account. With this in mind, enabling guest checkout payments is a no-brainer.Read more: What are the most popular online payment methods?
4. Implement 3D Secure 2.0 in your checkout process
   To put it very simply, 3D Secure 2.0 is an online security protocol created by the card networks to help you ensure the cardholder making the transaction is the genuine cardholder.Transactions considered high risk are required to complete a quick identity verification activity, such as using a one-time password, before the payment is processed; while low risk transactions skip this step. This helps you eliminate friction and save your low-risk shoppers from enduring extra verification hoops when they are at checkout, without compromising on security.Read more: How to keep your customers’ information secure when taking payments online
   
5. Show your commitment to security, privacy & experience
   Fraud and cybercrime are very real, costly risks, and consumers don’t want to hand over their payment information to a business that doesn’t take security and user experience seriously.Here are a few ways you can demonstrate your commitment to user privacy, safety, and experience:

• • Ensure your website has a TSL (Transport Security Layer) — also known as a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) — digital certificate
  • Check you have an accessible privacy policy
  • Partner with a trusted, leading online payment provider with built-in anti-fraud tools
  • Enable quick and easy refunds

Bonus tip: Don’t ask for more information than you need. When asking your customers for information during checkout, stick to the essentials. Avoid requesting details that simply are not relevant to the payment and shipping process — quick and easy is the name of the game, not tedious and invasive.

6. Remove payment barriers & declined transactions with Network tokenisation
   Network tokenisation is a process that converts a customer’s sensitive card payment information into a random string of characters that cannot be deciphered in the event of a breach. The data is encrypted from start to finish.Better yet, network tokenisation allows the customer’s token to be securely shared across the payments network (i.e. between the acquirer, merchant, card issuer, and cardholder). If the card details change (for example, the card expires), the information is updated across the network.If you have a subscription-based product or service, network tokenisation can save your business from dealing with declined transactions that happen as a result of changes in customer card payment information.Even if you don’t have a subscription-based set-up, your business can still benefit from automatic updates of stored cards on file for single purchases by improving checkout conversions.

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This article has been republished with permission from Eway

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Start improving your online shopping experience with Eway

At Eway, they see themselves as more than an easy way to accept payments online. They are collaborative partners, giving you control over your online payments. Eway value flexibility and user experience, and critically, their fraud prevention is industry-leading and award-winning.

Eway is certified with level 1 PCI DSS compliance, but even as an Eway merchant, you still have your areas of compliance to tick off. That’s why they offer a hands-on program called the Merchant Trust Initiative (MTI) to help you understand your obligations and responsibilities to manage cardholder data. It’s designed to make a complex process as easy as possible. See Eway’s PCI DSS infographic to see if your business is secure.

Eway’s Click to Pay which allows your customers to pay with just one click without compromising their security or privacy. The result: less cart abandonment, more sales, and more repeat purchases.

Also, if you haven’t heard of 3D Secure 2.0, check out this explainer article from Eway.

Discover more about Eway payments and how they can personalise their services to meet your unique needs. Contact Eway today.