DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

It is very important to remove barriers to online sales. When interviewing e-tailers for PR case studies, I did come across evidence of a surprising hurdle that could undo a lot of good promotional work. At the checkout point.

It would appear that the choice of online payment service provider could dramatically affect online sales.

I was interviewing four e-commerce traders to write case studies for a financial services company. One interviewee mentioned that they had achieved a 24% hike in sales on the day they switched from one payment service provider to another, due to a massive decrease in 'failed carts' - abandoned transactions at the point of sale.

Curious, I asked the other 3 case studies interviewees if they had seen a similar difference. None of them had been tracking failed carts during the change over, but, spurred on by a potential boost to business, they checked their figures. They all reported over 20% growth in sales that started on day one of switching online payment service provider, and the increase in sales persisted thereafter.

Now it's fair to say that I haven't done a recent side by side comparison with online payment services providers, so there's no point in asking me to name names. Nor am I an online payment finance specialist. I'm also aware that four case study interviewees is not a full research sample, but they were reasonably active e-tailers. I'm sure they had not been primed by the online provider in advance. Three had already been interviewed and hadn't mentioned the increase. They sounded genuinely surprised to me.

My interviewees reckoned the uplift in sales was due to the payment providers' different online registration requirements for customers. Their new online payment provider didn't require the customer to go through a cumbersome registration process. One less barrier to the sale. And a >20% hike in sales without any additional sales, marketing or PR? Now that's a potential added bonus that's well worth checking out!

Looks like the cost of services is not necessarily the only factor when choosing an online payment service provider. In this case, it was one of the most expensive providers that created the biggest barrier to sales, making it even less cost-effective.

Are there any online barriers you could remove for your customers to make your website easier to use and more sales effective?

Are you testing your site using people outside the company that have no familiarity with your website? Record them talking through their actions and feelings as they work their way through a series of tasks on your website to collect information and make a purchase. That could produce very useful information.

Some usability experts reckon they get over 100% uplift in sales by streamlining pages and placing clear and appropriate calls to action on key landing pages on websites. To achieve results they test variants again and again against analytics. Are there any tweaks you can make to test, refine and fine-tune the sales results from your site?

As my favourite NLP master (Erick Rainey) says: "There is no failure, only feedback!"

Here's to your ecommerce success.