Getting people interested in your product, convincing them with a brand, and proving yourself worth the money can be difficult enough for a modern business. But there are others who, often inadvertently, have trouble collecting the revenue from that interest for a different reason. They just can’t seem to get the money out of the hands of the consumer, even consumers who want those services. There are three major roadblocks that can explain a real discrepancy between the growing interest in a business’s services and the stagnation of its income.
Turning customers away
Online and offline, people like to pay in a whole variety of ways. Nowadays, the business that can’t accept a diversity of payments is setting themselves up for a fall. Beyond cash and direct bank transfer, there are broadly used services like PayPal to consider, but credit cards are the other option you should be most open to exploring. Of course, different processing services add different charges and will accept some cards but not others, so it’s worth looking at sites like creditcardprocessing.xyz to see which will open up your access to revenue the most without taking a larger chunk of it. Which payment options you use depends entirely on the target market. Do your research, even asking in a survey which payment options they would like to see. If you’re only relying on one, however, you could be missing out on as many as 56% of the market who prefer businesses that allow for options.
The rough and rocky road
Many customers will balk at the notion of seeing only one type of payment accepted. However, when it comes to the online world, the actual steps it can take to pay can make them lose interest in the purchase entirely. Focus the user experience of the website, as suggested by econsultancy.com and keep the route simple. You can consider allowing payments without having to sign up to an account on the site, simplifying the UI, allowing for dynamic error detection and easy fixes in customer forms, and so on. If you look at the analytics on your site and find that you’re getting a high bounce rate on the payment pages, a poor UX might be the reason.
Unreliable invoicing
You might not take payment directly, but rather invoice for it after you’ve delivered a service. If that’s the case, you must be aware of the sometimes-unreliable nature of invoicing. There are a few things you can do on your end, such as using software like waveapps.com to create invoices easily, free of error, and easy to read using pre-made templates. You can also create a payment policy that clients have to agree to before using your services, dictating certain time frames. Just make you keep the terms simple so as to not complicate things on the customer’s side. You can also automate alerts on late invoices, which can help you know when to send a follow-up email. Just keep it polite. Many customers will have a perfectly good and reasonable explanation as to why they haven’t sent it yet.
Depending on whether the business is online or offline and how you choose to accept payments, your difficulties may differ. However, it’s worth considering that it’s often the process of payment that can lose the customer’s interest. Take the effort to stamp out any wrinkles in it.
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