Imagine you are walking through an open-air market and see something for sale in one of the shops while on vacation. As you step up to check the price, you notice the tag is written in a language you do not understand and there is a strange symbol next to the numbers that looks vaguely familiar, but you aren’t quite sure of the conversion rates at the moment anyway.
At that point you ask the store owner how much the item costs. He doesn’t seem to understand you, he keeps pointing at the item and smiling a lot, but he isn’t giving you any information or providing you with a viable way to pay for it. Finally, you reach into your wallet, pull out some cash and try to pantomime, “how much money for this thing?” He clearly would like to accept some or all of your money, but at this point you are too frustrated to continue the charade any longer. That’s when you see the exact same item in the shop a few feet away, right next to a table sign that says, “We Accept Visa, Debit Cards, Bitcoin, Cash, Travelers Checks, Mobile SMS Payments and More!” Ten seconds later you buy the item from that shop owner instead.
In most cases, adding new billing options takes just a few minutes and a couple lines of code on the site owner side of the equation, and doing it can greatly improve your own balance sheet bottom line for years to come.
Now, put yourself in that exact same scenario online and you can immediately understand why providing potential customers with simplicity and diverse payment options at the point of sale is essential to any successful digital business. Your customers speak hundreds of languages, use dozens of different local currencies, have all kinds of idiosyncratic billing preferences - and they can find almost the same thing you are selling right now in another shop if your site is too cumbersome to complete their intended impulse transaction quickly.
As a site owner, adding options like debit card processing, SMS payments and Bitcoin functionality is easy. Competent payment processors can provide you with all of the banking, billing and payment page expertise necessary. Simply adding a set of billing options immediately adds to the momentum of your sales pitch by allowing consumers to make purchases more confidently. It also expands their ability to utilize an alternate form of payment if their primary choice is declined for any reason.
In most cases, adding new billing options takes just a few minutes and a couple lines of code on the site owner side of the equation, and doing it can greatly improve your own balance sheet bottom line for years to come.
