Having used Sage Pay (and formerly Protx) since 2004, we’ve grown from a small start-up to a large business using Sage Pay throughout the businesses evolution. The first thing we wanted from our payment gateway was good customer support, and a technical solution that we knew would meet our requirements at each stage of growth. Sage Pay’s capable support staff, and range of integrations are ideal in these regards.  But as an exporting company, the most important aspect for us was internationalisation and exporting.

The Challenges

When it comes to internationalisation, here are a few things to consider:

1. Payment in Different Currencies
2. Customer Perceptions of Restrictions
3. An Appropriate Rulebase
4. International Maestro
5. Fraud

1. Payment in Different Currencies

This is an important capability, some e-commerce sites let you view prices on screen in various currencies, but when it actually comes to payment they’ll only accept one – GBP for example.

This is a real barrier for many customers who want to pay in their local currency, especially when exchange rates are favourable.

Sage Pay makes this easy, the solution we have employed is to have a separate vendor name, and merchant account for each currency. The currency code GBP, EUR, USD etc. can then simply be specified with the transaction information.

Multiple vendor names can be grouped, so Sage Pay don’t charge you for each one, and it neatly separates the currencies for accounting purposes.

2. Customer Perceptions of Restrictions

Sometimes customers think that their card won’t work because it’s registered overseas. However most of the time, if a transaction does fail, it can be traced to an incorrectly entered 3D secure password!

The good news is that with an appropriate rulebase in Sage Pay, such address issues are easily avoided.

3. An Appropriate Rulebase

By setting your rulebase to accept either a CV2 value OR an Address Match, you ensure that cards registered in any country will be accepted. Enforcing address matching can result in a failed transaction for overseas cards because sometimes it’s not possible to check addresses based outside of the UK.

This doesn’t have to compromise security, combined with 3D Secure we find that fraudulent transactions are minimised.

4. International Maestro

This card type is optional and needs to be added to non-GBP currency accounts. Make sure it’s included, otherwise you could be missing out on business.  Don’t forget, to be able to accept international maestro, you must have 3D Secure switched on in your account.

5. Fraud

A combination of a decent rulebase and the 3rd Man Results, that Sage Pay provide within My Sage Pay, give you an excellent chance of spotting and stopping fraud.

The problem can be worse for exporters, as they tend to get a higher incidence of people trying stolen card details to attempt to receive an order overseas.

Sage Pay does allow you to block specific countries altogether, and if you take that approach I would recommend that Nigeria and Vietnam be high on your list!

However, we find that the number of fraudulent transactions is relatively low overall, and with experience and the help of the 3rd Man Results we can generally spot frauds easily, and don’t dispatch any goods until we have confirmed things.

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!

This month, focusing on the partner/customer relationship, I’ve chosen a business selling a product that will certainly put a spring in your step for the New Year! Family-run business Corrymoor Socks produce mohair socks, scarves and throws from Angora Goats farmed in the heart of the beautiful Blackdown Hills in Devon.

The Whitley family own 128 acres of land on which they keep their award- winning angora goats, producing copious amounts of mohair which is then combed, spun and knitted in England. Mohair is renowned for strength and durability. Natural mohair fibre means that Corrymoor Socks will keep your feet warm in winter and cool and fresh in summer. Proving this, Corrymoor’s loyal customers send in pictures of themselves in their socks globetrotting all over the world, from Greece to Antarctica and they’ve even featured in Turkish-born designer Hakaan Yildirim’s 2011 collection at the Paris Fashion Week!

With no prior knowledge of ecommerce, Corrymoor signed up to use Sage Pay in 2009 with the help of our Partner eBizmarts. Based in Uruguay, eBizmarts have worked with the Magento platform since the early beta testing and they are known as Magento ninja’s as there’s nothing they can’t do with the platform!  eBizmarts helped to manage the integration between Corrymoor and Sage Pay so the whole process ran smoothly and Corrymoor got the friendly help and advice they needed.

Stephen Whitley from Corrymoor tells us “When we designed our website, we looked at several alternative Partners. We are very pleased with our choice of eBizmarts and the seamless links between Magento and Sage Pay. Reliability is important for us and for our customers – we all like our service and products to be reliable, durable and without faults”.

We’re delighted to award Corrymoor with our January Business of the Month award!  We think they’re a ‘darn’ good business!

Good news! Your website has 10,000 visitors per week and you are number 1 in Google for your key search phrase. Your marketing team has done a fantastic job increasing your digital footfall and the traffic graph is going up.

However, have you checked just how many of those visitors requested a quote / bought your product / booked an appointment? If you have Google Analytics installed on your website with goal conversion tracking setup, it is pretty easy to see how many visitors are actually turning into customers by engaging with your website.

If the conversion rate is looking a little on the lean side (a 2% conversion rate essentially means a huge 98% of people left without taking action), it is probably time to look at how well your website is working for you.

Google, as you might expect, has a product to enable website owners to test the effectiveness of forms and content with their “Website Optimizer”; a free and very powerful system capable of A/B and multivariate testing to gauge which version of your enquiry form / checkout / quote tool works best. But before you get started setting up experiments, check out our suggestions to drive up your conversion rates:

1)     De-clutter

As Steve Krug, author of the hugely popular web usability book says, “Don’t make me think!”. Look carefully at your page – does it need two paragraphs of introduction or would one get the point across? Do you need to ask the user for their date of birth or can you quote them without? Perhaps just “Contact number” would be best rather than ask them to fill out Phone, Mobile and Fax.

Once a user is on the page where you want them to engage, it is essential to remove as many potential stumbling blocks as possible. If you can process their enquiry or order without asking for this information, do so (you can always ask them for this information later, once they have submitted their core details).

Quick tip: Keep forms concise. If you need to ask 40 questions to complete a quote, split your form into two stages: the first to capture the all-important contact details, and the second to ask everything else you need. If the second form isn’t completed, you can still call the customer to get the missing information.

2)     You are making the smart choice, Mr Customer

Your website user is about to become your customer, they are already on your contact page after all, but sometimes they just need a little more encouragement to take the last step and press the button.

Providing your customer with reassurance that they are doing the right thing can be the difference between form abandonment and a new sale. This can be achieved with a message about what you will do with their email address (“We will never pass your details on to 3^rd parties. Ever. Promise.”), that your website is secure and is independently tested, that X thousand people complete this form every month, or that you have won the award for Best Customer Service 2011 from the local paper.

Remove doubt from their minds by trying to second guess their concerns and addressing them with carefully placed messages. Make the process seamless, and comfortable.

Quick Tip: Always inform customers what you will, and will not, do with their email address details. Even if you do not need them to opt-in to your newsletter, still make sure you explicitly state your intentions with their details. (could it do with rewording so its stronger / more explicit?)

3)     Form labelling: above, to the left or to the right?

What might seem a fairly inconsequential aspect of your form design can have quite a serious impact on completion rates and speed.  Luke Wroblewsk, author of “Web Form Design” suggests that each can be used in an appropriate scenario.

Left-aligned labels are perhaps easier to scan read, but the gap between field and label can increase completion time – these should be reserved for advanced or unfamiliar field entry. Top-aligned labels allow users to capture both field and label in one eye movement and therefore improve speed of completion. Right-aligned labels are most commonly used when vertical space is restricted.

Quick tip: Unless your form is reasonably complex, use either top-aligned or right-aligned labels for fastest completion time.

4)     Little messages of support

A well-designed form should be pretty self-explanatory to complete. Certainly, most savvy users will know what is expected of them – to fill out their name, phone number and email address – but are there any fields that could use a little explanation?

Firstly, review your form’s questions and ensure that they are all as intuitive as possible. Strive for clear labels and certainly don’t leave any ambiguity about what you require as a response.

Secondly, for any questions that could use some clarification, make sure you provide a note against the field to fully explain (concisely) what is needed.

Quick Tip: To keep a tidy form without lots of additional text, use code to automatically display the relevant message as a user clicks into each field.

5)     The big red button

The most important aspect of your form is arguably the action button and therefore needs to be considered very carefully. There are several factors to think about: message, colour, location, size. Simply changing the colour of your button and nothing else could have a positive effect on your overall conversion rate.  In terms of size and location, your button should be visible and follow the user’s path through the form – don’t overly separate the button from the final field.

The message on the button should be a positive action. “Submit details”, whilst factual, is very dry where as “Send my details” or “Checkout now” suggests a more active engagement.

Quick tip: Avoid a grey button with a dry message. Ensure your button is visible and engaging.

6)     Test & re-test, learn and refine

Whether your first test is a success or an abject failure, don’t stop testing. Conversion optimisation is an activity that ought to be on-going even if the later tests are focussing on subtleties such as the title of the page or the shade of your action button. Each and every element of your website can affect sales conversion.

Make sure your website is working hard to sell your products and services. By following these guidelines, you will convert more visitors to customers, more enquiries to clients.

Quick Tip: Change only one factor at a time to ensure a proper controlled test. There is no limit to the number of tests you can do – strive for the ultimate completion rate! Increase your ultimate conversion rate.

Amy adds: Great tips from Crafted Media!  Interestingly we found in our 2011 E-Business Benchmark report that although the majority of e-businesses conduct usability testing on their website, around 1/3 of them forget to test their payment pages!  It’s good practice to check every page of the customer journey regularly alongside tracking checkout abandonment rates.  In most cases drop-outs can be down to a technical fault that you’ve never noticed and not only because a competitor is offering something similar at a better rate.

If you have any tips to share, please do so! We’d love to hear from you.

The key to our Secret Santa is that all gifts must be bought online from a Sage Pay customer.  Luckily we have plenty of customers who sell the weird and the wonderful so you can always find that perfect gift.  From a pair of pink fluffy ear warmers for the guy in development who complains about his cold ears, to musical slippers for that connoisseur of the finer things in life that works in the support team.  But this year we’ve been let down.  There were a few sad faces around the tree as some gifts bought online failed to turn up when expected.  Worst of all, many had ordered using next day delivery to make sure that their presents would arrive on time.

As an online retailer you need to ensure that you are managing customer expectations.  After all, you are asking for a certain level of trust from your customer – unlike instore shopping, your customer is handing over their cash before receiving the goods.  If their goods don’t arrive in time and you haven’t let them know of a delay, they won’t be returning to your store!

But it’s certainly not all doom and gloom.  There are e-tailers that have got delivery down to a T.  Present Finder make their dispatch and delivery information crystal clear and are proud to state that 99% of all orders placed before 4pm are despatched the same day.

And with 300%  growth in transactions over the last month, that’s a lot of customers to keep happy.

Mark from Present Finder told us ‘At The Present Finder, we take our customer service very seriously – we don’t just talk about it but we put it into action by ensuring our customers receive their order the day after they place it where possible.  If a customer orders by 3pm we will make sure the order goes out that day and our standard delivery goes by Royal Mail First Class post or by Courier.  By doing this we have delighted our customers time after time.  Not only do they constantly tell us on our live FEEFO feedback system how happy they are but also they keep coming back to us – what more can we ask?!‘.

If you’re anything like me and you’ve sorted your work Secret Santa present but haven’t actually gotten around to buying any other presents yet, you might want to have a little browse!

Alternatively, if your business sells the perfect products for Christmas gifts, post up your URL so we can all have a look!

Well done to the team at Present Finder for being chosen as Sage Pay’s December Business of the Month!

-17% transaction growth compared with this time on Cyber Monday last year.

-The spending average has also grown to £91 on gifts for friends and family, an increase of £3 over the previous year.

-The busiest time for online shopping was lunchtime  (12-2pm) but we also saw a transaction spike towards the end of the working day (4pm)

Simon Black, our Managing Director, gave his thoughts on the online shopping frenzy “As the outlook for the UK economy worsens in the wake of Osborne’s Autumn Statement, the public sector strikes and Phillip Green’s threatening to close of over 200 shops across the country, e-tailers can take some solace in the strong growth in online transactions year-on-year. Recent reports have shown that e-commerce now accounts for around 7.2% of the UK’s GDP and there’s a real potential for business in the online space.”

“With Monday lunchtime always the most popular time for online shopping, we’ve kept a particular eye on transactions being processed at this time on Cyber Monday. The growth of transactions year-on-year is huge: between 12pm and 2pm we recorded a 4.7% increase in transactions on last year, which is great news for e-tailers.  There was also a spike in transactions towards the end of the working day, at 4pm.

“Among our customers, transactions have been rising steadily over the past couple of weeks as people turn their thoughts to Christmas, but the final pay packet before Christmas and the host of online deals have created a real frenzy among shoppers. With only a couple of weekends to go before Christmas, we’re expecting to break records all the way up to Christmas Eve.”

I’d love to know your thoughts on Cyber Monday and if you saw the effect of the online buying surge.  Drop me a note below…

It’s commonly reported that the UK Cyber Monday falls at the same time as the US Cyber Monday. But key UK retailers, payment providers like ourselves and the British Retail Consortium all know from experience, that there’s a much bigger hike in sales a week later.  So, here’s what we see:

The US Cyber Monday falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving (This year it was the 28^th November). The UK Cyber Monday falls later, on the first Monday of December (5^th December).

There’s been a lot of buzz around Cyber Monday this year as sales are set to reach record highs. This morning Experian Hitwise UK reported that British shoppers would spend 350m hours shopping online during December for gifts for friends and family.  Now that’s a lot of web surfing!  Last year we found that lunchtime was the busiest time of the day with shoppers rushing online during their lunch break to grab Christmas bargains.

It’s also been estimated by the Centre for Retail Research, that British shoppers will spend a huge £13.4bn online this Christmas, with mobile shopping accounting for at least 12% of online spending.

Tomorrow we’ll be posting up our findings so stay tuned and happy selling!

Figures released earlier this year by PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that ‘sickies’ cost the UK economy a staggering £32bn each year.  Perhaps more surprisingly another survey reported that one in ten British men would pull a sickie to stay home and game, with one in a hundred doing so on a monthly basis.

With Sage Pay’s move into supporting online gaming, of course, we’re not condoning that!  But it does seem that the online gaming sector is going from strength to strength.

Since integrating this solution, Green Man Gaming have seen their Token usage increase by an average of 523% per month.  The Green Man team are working really hard to ensure the customer journey is quick and painless and this has a real effect on building a loyal base of returning customers.

Well done guys for making the payment process slick, quick and reliable (unlike the 1 in 100 who won’t make it into work this month!)

If you’re looking for more information on our Token system, you can find it here

The whole world is local to somewhere. However, when it comes to getting your company featured in Google’s local listings, it does actually reflect the scale of the opportunity in front of you.

• Google states that 20% of all searches have a local intent, that’s 2.8 billion searches per month globally.
• Of mobile traffic, upwards of 50% of searches have local intent
• 23% of time spent accessing internet is on a mobile device
• More than 4 million business listings on Google have been claimed by business owners

So how do you ensure your website appears before this locally focussed audience and maximise the opportunity? Here are 6 steps to make sure your business is at the top of the search engines.

1)     Claim what’s rightfully yours

Your first port of call is Google Places – www.google.co.uk/places – which is where you can “claim” your business listing.  You can add a Place page for every business location, the more you list the better coverage you can have. Make sure you fill out ever possible element of the Place page – business hours, detailed description, you can have 10 photos and link to 5 YouTube videos (even if it’s your logo and the front of your building) and you can also be listed in up to 5 categories. Check out your competitor’s listings to see how they’re listed and don’t forget, if they haven’t filled out a section it doesn’t mean it’s unimportant but an opportunity to steal a march on them.

Quick tip: Make sure you are trying to claim your listing with a Google account email on the same domain as your website, rather than your personal Hotmail address. You can set up Google account emails under any domain, it doesn’t have to be name@googlemail.com. 

e.g. www.craftedmedia.com may use the email – name@craftedmedia.com. 

2)     Citations are the new links

Google likes links, it’s always been hungry to map out the internet and a large proportion of its ranking elements favour websites and businesses with more links. However, in local search there’s a big opportunity as citations are the new links. This means getting your business details listed on as many different websites as possible. They need to match up with the business address, website and phone number as both your Place page and on your website itself. But list each business location on as many of these sites as possible: Hotfrog, Yell.com, BizWiki, Qype, Freeindex, Thomson Local, Yelp, Bview, UpMyStreet, Trusted Places, Scoot, Tipped, Infoserve, City Visitor, TouchLocal, UFindus and Smile Local.

Quick Tip: There are services that’ll add these on-mass for you, but manual submission is always better.

3)     It’s not what you know but who you know

As well as citations on the generic sites mentioned above, it’s very helpful to get as many listings on other relevant sites as possible. Do you belong to a local chamber of commerce? They probably have a members section. Networking clubs, professional bodies, business listings in your town or if your business sponsors a local school, nearly all of these can lead to having your business name, address and website listed on a highly relevant, local website. On a wider scale, ensure your business details are listed in full on “Distributors” pages on supplier’s websites and leverage any other industry links you can.

Quick tip: Scan your invoices as they come in for companies with websites who might link to you, often gems can be unearthed in the unlikeliest of places.

4)     Customers can make you king

Alongside your proximity to a searched for location, and the citations mentioned above, generating customer reviews is one of the most helpful things to achieving a good listing. This is easier than it sounds; it’s all about leveraging your existing client base in a positive way. When you get a customer email about your great service, respond thanking them and saying how you’d be very grateful if they could post a review on sites such as Qype or Yelp. Consider sending emails a couple of weeks after a customer’s transaction asking for feedback and if they would leave a review on your Google Place page.

Quick Tip: Don’t be afraid of the odd negative review. If you promote this to your best customers it’ll quickly be drowned out and it actually helps you get a critical mass of reviews.

5)     Don’t copy, imitate

In nearly every vertical there’s one company that does things very well. See where they’re listed and mentioned around the web as often a lot of them will be relevant to you as well, so you can get listed there too. Look at how you can do what they do, but better.

Quick tip: In Google search for these links using: “competitor.com -site: competitor.com”. This will return pages mentioning their website from around the web.

6)     Never ending story

As with traditional search, the key to success is to make local search part of your everyday business profile. Make it part of every supplier arrangement, ensure good feedback is followed up, encourage reviews on your Google Place page via regular newsletters, mention it to your longest standing customers. The results are cumulative and with a continued effort the results will quickly build up over time.

Quick Tip: Expect regular change in you rankings, they are very dynamic and you won’t always be #1 even when you’re up there.

Ian Miller – Search Director at digital agency Crafted Media

Our business, www.funkygiraffebibs.com designs and distributes fashionable, bandana style baby dribble bibs. While the financial reward that comes with exporting is hugely beneficial for our business, it was nevertheless a risky venture and having a reliable card payment company was essential. Using Sage Pay means our customers can pay with their local currency. We now accept payment in Sterling or Euros and will soon also accept Australian dollars.  But where do you start your overseas trade? At first, we found it easier to target English-speaking countries and those with reliable postal services, such as Ireland and Australia.

When it comes to exporting, planning for potential problems will help in the long-term. Our experience suggests that making the choice between using a courier service and a postal service is a good first step. While using a courier might spring out as the obvious choice, using a postal service can be cheaper and large orders can still be tracked. It makes sense for lower value merchandise to be sent in this way, but don’t forget to price in the cost of dealing with hassle when one of your packages does get lost! Most importantly, be realistic in your estimates of delivery time. I always say that to under promise and over deliver is the best foundation for a business.

Get your prices right and exporting could be the best thing that ever happened to your business. It can never be repeated too often.  Make sure you study the market and figure out your competition. If you find that what you’re offering is unique, then you could even consider raising your prices above those in your home market.

Finally, don’t neglect all that legal stuff just because it’s dull. Be clear on your terms and conditions for overseas sales – for example, decide how long an item should take to be delivered before you classify it as ‘lost’ – and be aware of intellectual property (IP) issues, such as whether your trademarks apply in foreign countries.

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The 2011 e-business benchmark report features statistics and tips on everything from Getting people to your site, Making it easy for people to pay, Fraud, Expanding overseas and Mobile commerce.  The report also includes e-commerce insights from leading online retailers such as Sweaty Betty, TruffleShuffle and Breo.  You can download a complimentary copy here.