The Fast Checkout and Choosing the right Payment Provider
Posted on June 12, 2007 by
Adie 
eCommerce 
4 Comments
If you’re running an online business (store) you should be fimiliar with the fast and smooth checkout procedure? the customer should be able to click and buy a product/service within three clicks (ideally).
Do you know what this does…it creates word-of-mouth marketing like you wouldn’t believe!
This has massive benefits, you could even be more expensive than your competitor for your product or service, but by having a faster loading site than them and a super fast checkout procedure you will end up with very happy customers! I remember using certain sites that got this process right (Play.com, Amazon.com) I immediately learnt a big lesson, get this right as one of the first things you do when building your online store and you have one foundation set.
I love it that consumers are impatient online (although I’m not sure why as all the stress is taken out when compared with offline shopping?) make it so simple (a two year old could order from your site) and you’ll have people talking about your service for years!
People may forget the actual product but they sure will remember how fast it took to order from your site. Do you understand why???
Because they’re impatient! they want in and out quickly to go about their day. Be fast, make it as simple as you can and you’ll have the basis of a good online store.
The next important part of this process is choosing the right merchant. Get one that suits your budget and solution. They must be able to grow as your business grows, there is no use having a merchant who can only handle 50 orders per day when you’re looking at acheiving at least 100. If their server falls over who’s to blame for the lost sales? I’ve been in this situation and we lost aprroximately $20k on one weekend because of a system fault. This is slighty different, but you must know your merchant and what they can provide you with, quality and service matched with great pricing.
I’m going to outline some pro’s and con’s of the Merchants I have used over the past 7 years.
eButtonz
We used a whole solution at first with eButtonz offering very small online businesses a shopping cart and payment processor through WorldPay. We grew out of this option within five months, but none-the-less they were perfect for what we needed at the time. Their customer service and support was always fast and reliable. Shame we had to move on really because I liked them. They just couldn’t offer the support for the amount of transactions we were dealing with at the time. Things may have changed now? also we had problems with WorldPay…
Application Costs: eButtonz Costs
Worldpay
Ahh…wonderful Worldpay. No, not at all wonderful in my eyes, I think this can happen when a company like this has the huge amount of success they had in such a short space of time. Growing to the size they did obviously didn’t help them, lacking in customer service, quality and ease of use of their admin back end and their famous holding of your funds for months at a time, this is not a good business model to me. I really don’t like these guys if you couldn’t already tell…mainly there attitude towards small businesses at the time pissed me off! They almost took us out of business!
Again, my be good to customers stands true. They ended up losing out on a very large, potentially long-term customer with transactions exceeding 2000+ per day.
Application Costs:
* Set-up Fee: $400
* Monthly Fee: $60 each month (first month payable upon application).
Total Transaction Service Charges:
We charge per transaction for the following:
* Credit Cards: 3.75% - 4.5%
(2.4% - 2.9% IMA Fee, 1.35% - 1.6% processing fee)
* UK Debit Cards: £0.50 - £0.45
(£0.20 - £0.25 IMA Fee, £0.18 - £0.25 Processing fee)
Additional Charges
* Additional Currencies: Domestic currency provided as standard part of Internet Merchant Account. $100 per additional currency.
* Chargebacks: due to the costs involved in reversing transactions, WorldPay will charge you $20 for every chargeback.
* Settlement: Settlement in GBP for a UK bank account is £0.35. Settlement to a bank account outside the UK and in local currency is £2.50.
The minimum amount that can be settled is £10.00 in GBP, and the equivalent of £100.00 for all other currencies.
Protx
What they say about themselves: We have grown to become the largest independent Payment Service Provider in the country because our solutions offer our customers exceptional value for money without compromising on the level of service and functionality we provide.
We have been satisfied overall with what they have provided us with over the years, although their servers have been hacked and we have experienced down time this is nothing when compared with others providers we have heard about. They have rebuilt their main front-end sales website, but I still believe they have a very amatuerish back-end administration, don’t let that put you off though.
They are fairly easy to set-up and integrate and so simple to manage, ie: refunds, transaction look-ups, fraud protection. Unfortunately they only service the UK. We did our research and found at $40 per month with no other charges allowing 1000 transactions per quarter (at the time (2003) being perfect for us) and they still are. I highly recommend them.
Application Costs:
Small Business Service
For customers who process less than 1,000 transactions per quarter, the Small Business Service offers the simplest and most affordable pricing package in the UK.
Small Business Service users are charged £20 fixed fee per month with no additional charges whatsoever.
You are not charged transaction fees, irrespective of the value of the transaction or the number you do. If your site does more than 1,000 transactions per quarter you will be moved across to the Corporate Payment Service in the following quarter. There will be no retrospective charges if your account is migrated.
Corporate Payment Service
All customers who process 1,000 transactions or more per quarter are automatically included in the Corporate Payment Service scheme.
Corporate customers pay 10p per transaction with no additional charges.
The minimum transaction level for corporate users is 200 transactions per month, so if your volume falls below that, you will still be charged £20. If your volume remains below 1,000 per quarter, you will be automatically moved over to the Small Business Service in the following quarter.
VSP Terminal Only Service
Customers who require VSP Terminal only for mail order and telephone order transactions and process less than 300 transactions per quarter can benefit from a special low cost option.
VSP Terminal Only customers will be charged a flat rate of £10 per month with no additional charges.
You are not charged transaction fees, irrespective of the value of the transaction or the number you do. If your site does more than 300 transactions per quarter you will be moved across to the Small Business or Corporate Payment Service as above in the following quarter. There will be no retrospective charges if your account is migrated.
Bespoke Pricing
Our rates are subject to negotiation for websites that process many thousands of transactions. For more information about our pricing structure please contact us.
(pricing details have been taken from the merchant websites mentioned in this article and are subject to change at any time)
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Yeh great article my customers were always turned off when I had used a checkout cart that took forever to fill out. I switched to a different credit card processor and checkout which took half the time to fill out and I instantly noticed a less of a drop out rate for my customers at the checkout stage.
Adie,
Could you write a post about how you go about finding good suppliers?
Thanks!
I stick with the ‘3 Clicks’ rule for all aspects of my sites - if someone cannot get to their goal within three clicks, you are definitely doing something wrong.
- Martin Reed
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