Many payment alternatives is a must

One effect of global e-commerce is that today’s consumers are becoming more and more picky and harder to please. With the whole world at their fingertips, it is no longer enough to just offer customers the right product at a good price. If you can’t also offer them their preferred delivery or payment method customers are likely to move on to some other site that will meet their demands.

That online customers have become harder to please is evidenced by statistics on shopping cart abandonment. According to Statista, 75.6 percent of all online purchases were abandoned in the first quarter of 2018, in 2006 that number was only 59.8 percent. All these abandoned carts are not lost forever, of course. In many cases, customers will fill their carts just to compare with competitors and even if that purchase isn’t finalized they might still come back to buy later. At the same time, statistics do show that it is fairly easy to lose a customer altogether if you can’t satisfy their preferences.

Payment methods are crucial
One such preference is the issue of what payment alternatives you offer your customers. According to a survey that Bambora and the e-commerce organization FIDH conducted, 25.4 percent of Danish online costumers claimed that they have refrained from shopping at an online store because their preferred payment method was not offered.

That online customers want to be in charge of how they pay also seems to be the case across the Nordics. In 2017 Postnord asked Nordic consumers how important it was for them to be offered a variety of payment alternatives when shopping online. In that survey, 72 percent stated that this was somewhat important or very important.

Since the payment method is often a deciding factor for where consumers choose to buy it is important that you, as a merchant, are able to adapt to customer preferences. However, this adaptation has gotten increasingly difficult with the wave of innovation that has swept over the payment landscape in past years. There are simply a lot more alternatives to the classic card payments today, and offering all of them is far from easy. At the same time there is no doubt a lot of money to be made in trying.

Bambora Checkout offers all the most popular payment methods
Our goal at Bambora is to make payments easier, both for you as a merchant and for your customers. That is why we have developed our online payment solution, Bambora Checkout, to handle all the most common payment methods.

With Bambora Checkout you get an easy-to-use payment solution that allows you to safely accept payments from Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Dinersclub, as well as international mobile wallets like MasterPass and local alternatives like Swish in Sweden, Vipps in Norway and MobilePay in Denmark. In addition, you also get the possibility to offer your customers invoice and installment payments along with recurring payments for subscription services.

With the rapid development of new payment methods in mind, we are also continuously developing Bambora Checkout to cater to new preferences popping up on different markets. The idea is that you as a merchant should be able to focus on your business and not have to worry about losing customers because you lack the right payment alternatives.