Make the most of selling opportunities this summer

The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Euro 2012 football championship and London Olympics have provided an unprecedented opportunity for online retailers to exploit additional sales potential this summer. Here are some top tips on ensuring your website is in tip top order to maximise this once in a generation sales window.

Payment gateway

• Create an attractive payment page that looks like part of your site, even though it is actually a totally secure white label page provider by your PSP
• Offer a range of payment methods to enable your customers to choose how they pay
• Make the WHOLE payments process easy to understand and use
• If selling internationally, display currencies your customers understand and payment methods they feel comfortable with
• Provide clear confirmation of payment being approved or declined – don’t leave your customers guessing
• Put the checkout total on all pages, as customers shop
• Provide a clear returns policy
• Making shipping costs clear BEFORE checkout

Mobile payment optimisation

The retail industry is awash with talk of how rapidly the mcommerce market is expanding, but many retailers miss the fundamental power of the mobile transaction. The 'mobile payment' is the catalyst by which merchants will gain tremendous marketing and operational benefits especially over this celebratory British summer. Many retailers do not fully understand the vast catalogue of solutions that are unlocked by letting their customers pay by smartphone. Transaction times can be reduced by 80%, paperless receipts are a reality, customer service and relationships are improved, costs are lowered.

Customer experience

The Jubilee or Olympics might be the catalyst that drives a customer to you for the first time but if you don’t meet their expectations, it could be also be their last visit. So if you’re expecting increased demand, ensure that your internal systems can cope and staff are suitably briefed. Similarly, think about your post-purchase communications to your customers as they can be critical for retention. Offer a text service to update them on orders and delivery especially over bank holiday periods.

Reduce overseas fraud risks

This summer, Britain will be a big focus for international customers and for companies trading across borders. Card not present fraud can be reduced by using geolocation, which identifies a user’s geographic location from the IP address of the computer which the order has been made. Operating across ecommerce transactions in real-time, the system can identify locations where the probability of fraud is the highest.

International

Once you’ve approved a potential international consumer, you’ll find they use a variety of payment methods and retailers need to offer solutions to reflect this. For example, many Europeans don’t use credit cards.

Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium are four of the largest ecommerce markets in Europe and are relatively light users of credit cards. Therefore, it is critical to offer payment solutions that they do use.

SecureTrading supports European payment systems including ELV, iDeal, Sofortüberweisung and Giropay. Most ecommerce in the Netherlands uses iDeal while 51.4%* of Germans prefer to use Sofortüberweisung. Such methods reduce the risk of chargebacks and payments made with iDeal are guaranteed and cannot be reversed.

So follow these simple tips and enhance your sales this summer and you might just feel like you’ve won Gold!