Tempt your customers with a breadcrumb trail…

In our most recent issue of Moving Money, we have included a round-up of the results of our 2011 e-business benchmark report as we prepare to survey e-businesses for the 2012 version.

As I was reading the article, I was thinking about how important the first page of your website is.  It really is fundamental in terms of encouraging potential customers to part with their hard-earned cash.  E-commerce is a competitive market with consumers increasingly likely to shop for comparisons before completing their purchase so when a shopper first hits your site, it needs to keep visitors interested, assured and enticed enough to get them to the checkout.

This month, I’ve picked out Sage Pay customer www.Biscuiteers.com as a great example of a website. Its welcoming, easy to use and exceptionally well thought out.  The business behind the site was set up by Harriet Hastings and her husband Stevie Congdon. They came up with the idea to set up a biscuit gift business online with a difference.  With the tag line “Why send flowers when you can send biscuits”, Biscuiteers craft beautiful hand iced biscuits delivered in gorgeous illustrated keepsake tins.

And as a solely online business, the Biscuiteers team know the importance of providing a rich, interactive shopping experience.  Along the top of the Biscuiteers site, there are clear links to the contact details, account log in and basket.  One of the things we found in our e-business benchmark report is that displaying a shopping basket on your home page and across your site is no longer a differentiator; it’s an absolute must.  Likewise, displaying your contact details clearly helps to reassure your customer that you are easily reachable should you not be happy with your purchase or if you have any queries regarding the service.

Always one for a bargain, I quickly spotted a special offer on the homepage of the Biscuiteers website.  We found in our e-business benchmark report that 76% of top performing businesses are using special offers to entice browsers to convert into browsers.

It’s good practice to display your security policy on your website to show customers that you take their personal data seriously and will use it responsibly.

We found that many top performing sites are differentiating themselves in their use of social media but there’s marginal difference between them and the lower performing sites we looked at.  This point is really important, as it’s not necessarily what you do, but how you do it that will make a difference.  It’s no surprise then to see over three quarters (76%) of our top e-tailers regularly luring visitors to their site through the use of social channels.  Biscuiteers are using Twitter and Facebook to engage in real dialogue with their customers, let them know about new products and when to expect a bargain.  They are also using YouTube to post lessons on baking and icing for anyone who wants to have a go at home!   Biscuiteers display these links as icons to aid navigation.

Top sites are recognising more than ever that customers not only want a good deal, they want it quickly.  Offering next day delivery was the most popular service offering.  If your business is able to offer this, don’t hide it away; it’s a great way to get ahead of the competition.

With a multitude of delicious products available, Biscuiteers have made navigation around the site as easy as possible for their customers by filtering all products, making finding suitable products easier for customers to find.

They keep this up to date with latest events so if you’re looking for some Olympic themed biscuits, then you know where to go – unfortunately they haven’t included the occasion ‘I just love biscuits and want to buy some for myself’ which is generally what I would be searching for!

Founder of Biscuiteers, Harriet Hastings told me ‘We’re really pleased to have won Sage Pay’s business of the month award.  It is a real tribute to the team at Tom&Co who have worked so hard on our website and the re-launch last September.  As an online retail shop, our website is our real and virtual shop and the heart of our business.  Customer experience  is critical in building sales and improving conversion rate.’

‘We didn’t use third party user testers but we did spend a lot of time testing the customer journey and functionality among ourselves before we launched the new website.  The biggest questions we had to answer were around navigation and visibility of our growing product range.  The most important decision we made was to make search by occasion the primary search tool.  We looked at best practice on other sites to make sure our social media strategy was up to date and appropriate to our business model.’

Well done Biscuiteers for being awarded as our Business of the Month.  As websites go, theirs really takes the biscuit and of course, the proof is in the pudding!

A Token Payment

This month I’ve been thinking about PCI compliance (I can hear the widespread groans from here!).  Not a popular topic I’ll admit, but one that is crucial to online traders.  Payment Card Industry compliance is infamous for being a costly overhead, both in time and money.  But more than anything it’s a burden.  The responsibility of storing or transmitting data can be a huge worry but many vendors feel that they need to do so in order to provide their customers with a slick payment process.

But this doesn’t need to be the case!  Using our newly launched Token System, e-tailers have the ability to offer a super quick, single click payment process for customers, without actually storing or transmitting personal information such as credit card details.  This means that you can maintain great customer usability whilst ensuring that you won’t encounter any data security issues.  Hurrah!

So how does it work I hear you ask?  Well, the Token System gives merchants the ability to convert credit card numbers, which are given directly to Sage Pay by online shoppers and stored within Sage Pay’s secure systems, into a token or card number ‘alias’.  The tokens can then be safely stored by the merchant and are used to process transactions as and when required, without incurring high level PCI DSS compliance costs.

One company that not only takes their business responsibility very seriously but also their customer experience, is Crooked Tongues.  They are now fully integrated with our Token system solution and their customers are already benefiting from a quick and easy checkout.  Maintaining customer usability whilst ensuring sensitive data is secure has always been crucial to Crooked Tongues, so that customers feel confident in their online store and want to revisit again and again.

Gary Warnett, Content Manager at Crooked Tongues, sister company to ASOS.com, says of the innovative system: “This is exactly what we’ve been looking for – a safe and easy way to store our customer’s details so they can come back and enjoy the Crooked Tongues experience time and time again, without the hassle of keying card details in every time.  It’s win-win, especially since we’re saving on PCI costs and its great value for money”.

We’re pleased to announce that Crooked Tongues has been crowned Sage Pay’s July Business of the Month for taking the protection of customer card data seriously and fighting the good fight against fraud!

More information on the Token System

Getting your ducks in a row…

One of my pet peeves is a badly designed checkout process.

It’s a terrible thing to spend hours searching for the products you want, get them all in your shopping basket in the right size and colour and then have to re-search for the product when it incomprehensively disappears from the basket or puts in 10 of the same product.  Then when you try to find your basket again, it’s completely vanished!  After searching the site for your basket, you find it.  Oh, you mean this miniscule icon in the bottom left hand corner that doesn’t even resemble a basket?!

Once you’ve gone through all this trauma, just wanting to pay, you’re hit with pages and pages of garbled checkout.  Enter your address.  A seemingly simple command but nowadays customers want goods delivered to their work address where they’ll be able to sign for their package, or to a friend or family members house as a gift.  You continue through the payment process only for your payment to fail because your delivery and billing address do not match.  Arrrggghh! Just let me pay!

The checkout process is such a fundamental part of running an online business.  Mess this up and your dropout rates will be sky-high.  Theres some pretty obvious things you can do to avoid high dropout rates at the checkout.

1. Keep things simple, don’t overload your pages.

2. Have a clear link to the shoppers basket on every page of your site.

3. Provide your shopper with an order summary before asking them to pay- Nothing makes customers cancel the process like confusion over how much they will be paying.

4. Keep your payment pages down to a minimum -The less pages, the less obstacles the shopper has to overcome in order to pay you.

5. Inform your customers of how far they are in the checkout process and whats coming next with a bread crumb trail If you have 3D Secure set up, it’s a good idea to let them know what it is and when they will encounter it.

So on my quest to find the Sage Pay Business of the Month for June, I’ve decided to focus on the checkout process and one e-commerce site that’s got it all wrapped up is Bombay Duck.

Their payment process is simple, uncluttered and comprehensive.  You don’t have to be a genius to manoeuvre through the site and their customised pages incorporate all of their branding so you don’t realise you have been redirected to Sage Pay to collect your sensitive data.  What’s even better is that if you are an existing customer, you can simply log in and find all of your address details stored so you don’t have to re-enter them every time you want to pay!

I’m sure my bank manager wishes my drop-out rates were higher but with companies like Bombay Duck making the checkout process so easy, it would be rude not to buy!

Congratulations to Bombay Duck for being Sage Pay’s June Business of the Month!

If you’d like to know more about optimising your checkout pages, download our E-Business Benchmark Report here.

Santa finds Sage Pay’s Business of the Month!

At Sage Pay we like to think we know our customers.  But with 27,000 of them, it’s pretty challenging for us to get to know them all.

In the run up to Christmas, I set the rest of the Sage Pay staff a challenge.  I asked them to buy their secret santa gifts from websites that use Sage Pay as their payment service provider (PSP).  And while they were at it, complete a quick survey about their shopping experience.

Our staff are a seasoned bunch of online shoppers and pretty hard to please, but here’s what they had to say…..

Though they hunted high and low, 46% of our staff were unable to find a security policy anywhere on the sites they were using and on top of that 38% were only able to find the security information tucked away in the far corners of the website.  One of my colleagues did find a great example of how to subtly include the security element on their site- Blissett Photo Books.

We were pleased to find that over 50% of the sites we used had 3D Secure set up as an additional fraud prevention method on their payment pages.  These lucky people are probably benefiting from lower rates with their merchant bank.  It also means that if they are defrauded, there’s a good chance the banks would take liability for those particular transactions too.  Read more about 3D Secure here

What I didn’t tell people was that they were helping me search for our very first Business of the Month.  After we pulled together all of the results, we realised there was a clear winner in terms of customer experience.  So we are pleased to announce that Henleys have been chosen to kick off Sage Pay’s Business of the Month!

Our staff were really impressed by the usability of Henleys site.  Being able to narrow down a search by price or filter products by colour makes their website extremely easy to use.  Our Marketing manager Charlotte said “Their checkout process was seamless and the best bit was….free next day delivery!”

When we told Lynsey Emersic, Henleys e-Commerce manager of their award here’s what she had to say…

“We are really pleased to be voted the first Business of the Month by Sage Pay.  The success of the Henleys Clothing website is largely down to the ease and usabililty of our site.  That said, usability is something that we are always looking to improve upon to ensure that our customers get the best experience whilst shopping for clothing on the site.  Having Sage Pay integrated into the basket page of the site helps us to provide as smooth a transaction as possible for the Henleys customer, which is the most important thing to us.”

Well done Henleys….and I wonder who will be our March Business of the Month…