Tokenisation

Here at Sage Pay, with 36,000 customers all in an increasingly competitive industry, we often get asked the best way to convert browsers into buyers.  There’s no magic answer for this, but there are some things you can do to encourage shoppers to complete a sale.

In our opinion, the most important thing to do is to always be in the know as to what’s happening on your site.   Track how many web visitors you’re getting every day, how many end up converting to a sale and if shoppers are dropping out of the buying process, monitor exactly where they are leaving your site.  Look at your website as a leaky pipe -once you know what your dropout rates are and the exit points (where there could be potential issues), go about plugging the holes to make sure that as many of your visitors complete a purchase.  When we surveyed online businesses for our 2011 e-business benchmark report, we were overwhelmed by the amount of respondents who weren’t doing this.  Knowledge is power, people!

The two biggest reasons why shoppers drop out of the payment process is not feeling that the web pages they are on, or the company is not secure. Customer confusion (not knowing where to click) and long, drawn out payment pages is the other sales conversion killer.

This is where tokenisation really comes into it’s own.  By saving your customers card data against an alias using the token system, you can increase customer loyalty, whilst keeping them completely secure.

The token system can also provide you with the option to streamline your payment pages.  Reducing the number of payment pages is a proven way to improve conversion rates.  We found that most successful e-tailers have a maximum of 2-3 pages. Don’t forget, the competition is just a click away so you want to do everything you can to create a quick and slick checkout process to keep them happy.

Of course, as always, our friends at eBizmarts are already way ahead of the game and their latest Sage Pay Suite includes full functionality of all our products and services including the token system, PayPal and back office integration.  If you are currently an eBizmarts CE user and want to upgrade to the new Suite to take advantage of Token, you can find details on their latest upgrade offer here.  If you’re not currently a user but are interested in the eBizmarts modules, you can drop them a message here and they’ll be happy to get you sorted!