While enabling mobile purchases on your website is a powerful first step towards increasing your customer base and boosting revenue, it shouldn’t be the only step you take.

You need to make your customers' mobile shopping experience as painless as possible, otherwise they will simply click away from your site and buy elsewhere - as shown by recent research conducted by the payment services provider Worldpay.

Worldpay surveyed 16,000 smartphone users in 10 countries about how they would like to pay for retail, travel, digital content and gaming on their smartphones, and the company identified what’s most important to them, what would make them buy more, and what would prevent them from buying.

They discovered that:

• consumers would pay 37% more for something when the payment experience is better
• nearly a third (31%) of UK consumers would pay more if the process is simple
• 50% would be happy to provide biometric data to make a payment
• 73% would expect to see payment options on a homepage
• the number one reason for shopping cart abandonment is a long checkout process

The key takeaway from Worldpay’s research is that the mobile shopping experience needs to be straightforward because a complicated or lengthy payment process causes potential customers to ditch their shopping cart – and probably never return to your website.

Having a smooth and speedy payment process in place also means that when customers do buy from you, they are likely to spend more.

Shane Happach, Head of Global eCommerce at Worldpay suggests that their research “serves as an important reminder to merchants that the latest in smartphone technology, from fingerprint scanning to facial recognition, can help create a faster and friction-free user experience.”

Whilst incorporating high-tech biometric features such as fingerprint scanning into the payment process is not a realistic option for most smaller businesses, simplifying and making the checkout process as quick as possible is certainly feasible – and so too is making sure that payment options are clearly displayed on the homepage.

As experts in mobile eCommerce web design, WTS Technologies ensure that the sites we build for our clients perform superbly and that the checkout process is quick and frictionless.

If you would like us to review your website’s existing payment gateway, or you’re considering upgrading your site to take mobile payments, contact WTS today.