Accepting Online Payments is Key to Your Website’s Success
One major ingredient of a successful website operation is accepting online payments. While you might have a terrific website, easily navigated, filled with quality, optimized content, with valuable information that’s relevant to your demographic audience, if you aren’t accepting online payments, your traffic, in both first-time and repeat visitors, will start to dwindle.
If you’re just taking the plunge, establishing an online presence for your home business, you want to launch with a well-thought out and organized website.
Most website owners hope to increase their bottom line, by reaching out to a wider audience than they enjoy in their brick and mortar venue.
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of accepting online payments. The benefits to your home based business are many, while the down side is quite minimal.
Among the benefits is the far greater number of sales you’ll make. Consumers have largely overcome the reluctance of using a bank card to pay for purchases online.
This makes purchasing a more convenient way to buy goods and services, along with the consumer having a greater selection from which to choose. Most consumers generally understand what a secure server is, a protocol which protects your sensitive personal information.
How many people do you think would bother making a bank deposit or writing a check, stamping and posting it off to place their order for your products when they can easily find a competing site, which is accepting online payments? Not many.
Keeping the pulse of your site’s activity is easily accomplished by checking your web stats frequently. See which pages are most popular and check your incoming and outgoing links.
This can help you further optimize pages, on a continuing basis. You can also analyze your web stats to determine what page sent your customer to the order page.
There are several routes you can take to integrate accepting online payments into your site’s functions. PayPal is one popular site which processes payments made online to your business. It’s simple and free to set up.
The downside, if it could be called that, is minimal. You are charged a small percentage transaction fee to receive payments, which is also the case with the array of online merchant accounts.
The major difference between the two is that online merchant accounts typically charge setup fees.
Before choosing the vehicle through which you’ll be accepting online payments, you’ll want to run a comparison of several prospective vendors and see which works best for your business.
It’s been established that the rule of thumb on the time required attracting a visitor that buys a product or service, involves about 7 repeat visits to any given website. Naturally, you’ll want to set up your website with as many reasons to revisit as possible.
A site that’s not accepting online payments isn’t going to be on the short list of a surfer’s bookmarks.
It’s too much trouble to buy otherwise. Don’t be left in the dust by your competitors, who are accepting online payments!
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