Seven Tips to Higher Conversions and Increased Sales with PayPal
The PayPal team paid a visit to LYONSCG earlier this week to share some best practices on improving conversion and increasing sales when using PayPal as a payment option on an eCommerce website. Considering that PayPal as a payment option has been shown to deliver a 5% to 15% lift when made available to customers, it’s clearly a very useful tool for eCommerce retailers.
Here are seven tips they shared to drive higher conversion and increased sales:
1. Use they PayPal Express shortcut button to simplify mobile checkout. The goal through this is to reduce the conversion friction by minimizing the number of clicks and characters that need to be entered to complete a purchase.
2. Place the Call-to-Action button above the fold–especially on mobile pages. With less real estate on mobile devices, the call-to-action often gets pushed down to the bottom of a long scroll or even a subsequent screen. With nearly 50% of consumers reporting that they use smartphones for shopping, make sure your mobile pages have a prominent call-to-action visible on the first screen customers encounter.
3. Consider different approaches for single large value items versus those with significant up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. It makes sense to give consumers a chance to consider additional frequently purchased items before sending them to a payment screen. However, if the item is typically purchased by itself, a prominent shortcut button to provide an easier checkout can improve conversion rates.
4. Include the logo of the merchant on the PayPal page. It’s surprising how many merchants lose the trust of the buyer by presenting a payment page that does not include the seller’s logo. This is an easy fix, and can be included either via the API or as a customized setup.
5. Provide the merchant name on the checkout page. Even more surprising, some merchants don’t even include their name on the checkout page. If you logo of the merchant isn’t included, at least provide the seller’s company name. We’ve seen some merchants send buyers to a PayPal screen without any identification that the customer has come to the right place. This creates an obvious concern for the buyer.
6. Test the on-page location of logo. In fact, test the placement of everything. In this day and age of optimization and best practices, A/B testing should be a given.
7. Automatically pre-fill the customer’s email address and other fields and hide unnecessary fields. Again, this one is especially important when it comes to mobile shoppers. Small devices and on-screen keyboards turn off consumers–the less typing they have to do, the better. And if you don’t need to collect the information, don’t provide the option and make your form look long and imposing.
Hopefully these tips will help increase your online store’s conversion rate. If you need help implementing any of them, LYONSCG is a PayPal partner and is well experienced in implementing the tool. Visit our contact page and request a call!
An electrical engineer by education and marketer by choice, Steve Susina uses data and analytics to help firms generate demand, establish thought leadership and strengthen the company brand. He currently serves as Marketing Director for Lyons Consulting Group (LYONSCG), a full-service eCommerce digital agency. Previously he managed demand generation programs for Crain Communications, and led the marketing team for IT services provider Laurus Technologies. He is a Marketo Certified Expert with more than five years experience using marketing automation.
