Why Customer Payment Journey Matters The Most For D2C Brands in 2023

Before we get into how you can optimize the customer payment journey, let’s take a look at what happens when you don’t:

In today’s fast-paced digital world, customers have a short attention span because they’re spoilt with choices. As per studies, the attention span of an internet user is much shorter than that of a goldfish.

This is not just true for the content they consume on social media. It also holds true for the payment process they need to complete.

If the payment process is too complicated, customers are likely to get distracted and abandon the cart and maybe even move to another competitor.

You can streamline your payment process by minimising the number of steps and clicks to complete a transaction. One-click payment, visual cues on the time to wait for the payment to complete, and auto-fill features work great here to minimise friction here. [youtube id="H_FWyeexv3k"]

With so many options available to online shoppers, it’s only normal for consumers to explore all the options available to them.

The longer the customer payment journey, the higher are the chances of them getting distracted by other offers and promotions they’re getting targeted by across different channels and platforms.

Throughout the payment journey, businesses have a lot of opportunities to collect data from customers that they can leverage to refine their sales and marketing strategy.

If you’re not able to convert the consumer soon enough, you risk losing them to distractions. The earlier they leave your site, the less information you have on them.

If you create a lengthy buying process with too many fields, you again risk getting the cart abandoned because making the purchase took too much time.

Prepaid orders help D2C brands (especially smaller ones) manage their cash flow effectively. However, if there are postpaid options like cash on delivery (COD) and if the customer figures out that it will take them less number of clicks in COD, they will opt for it.

But too many CODs can impose risks of cancellations, payment fraud, longer payment processing time, non-delivery, RTO etc, which again impacts the bottom line of your revenue.

Optimising the customer payment journey is a lot similar to conversion rate optimisation. Here are some strategies and tips we recommend following:

More and more customers are now making purchases on-the-go. That’s why it’s important to keep in mind the customer payment journey on mobile devices as well.

Right from reducing the number of steps in the customer payment process to how the information and fields are displayed, every little aspect counts. So remember to test your payment process for smaller screens.

Take Swiss Beauty for example. The leading beauty and personal care brand understands the importance of on-the-go shopping and has partnered with GoKwik to streamline its checkout process. Besides completing checkout in a matter of seconds, the brand has also paid attention to a seamless payment process. For this, on the backend, GoKwik ensures that every transaction processed via its partner payment gateways is successful, giving both Swiss Beauty and its customers the peace of mind.

As we commonly appeal through many of our blogs, Indians are fast adopting digital mode of payment. And, with vast number of payment options available today, as a business, you need to make sure you offer a major chunk of those to ensure conversion.

To really optimise your customer payment journey, focus on offering payment methods that are common, most popular or majorly preferred by your target audience.

With solutions like GoKwik, you can not only display the multiple payment modes available on your site, but also those that the consumer is more likely to use. For example, if an online shopper has a history of using UPI to make order payments, your checkout process can immediately highlight the use of the same payment method while still offering to pay via other modes.

Placing an order can be a tedious process.

Imagine liking a product trending on social media, wanting to buy it immediately. But then once you’re on the site, you need to fill out your name, address, pin code, email address, phone number and other information. This is not just time-consuming, but also a buzzkill to your interest.

This is where brands that offer field auto-fills to win the interest of shoppers and convert them into paying customers immediately. By filling maximum data using their previously filled information, you get to nudge them towards making the payment much faster. In fact, you can even nudge your shoppers to save their card details (as per RBI directed guidelines) so that next time shoppers just need to put in their CVV and OTP to authenticate the payment, that too in a matter of seconds.