Since the advent of the pandemic, most businesses and stores have been forced to go online with their products and services. Since these products and services are available online now, it only makes sense that you have a dedicated online payment form for them as well that helps your customers make online transactions and purchases.
According to apps.shopify, one of the leading application and plugin developers for ecommerce platforms, it is necessary that you set up an optimal form page for your customers to facilitate easy online transactions for them. The better your online payment form is, the more your customers will be happy and willing to fill them out and use your website.
It may sound like exaggeration but your form actually has more impact on the chances of your customers returning to your website than you’d think. That’s why it is essential that you create the most optimal online payment form page for your online business that can keep your sales going up and help retain customer growth.
In this guide, we will help you set up the best form page for your online business with the help of several professional tips. Read the article till the end so that you don’t miss out on any crucial tip.
Make the online payment form easy to understand.
While an obvious preference for many people out there, you’d be surprised to know how many people undervalue the importance of having proper grammar and fluid sentences in their online payment form. It is extremely crucial that you use proper and clear wording with proper grammar to ensure that your customers know exactly which field they are writing in.
Along with wording and grammar, it is also imperative that you use a lucid font with a stark colour for labelling your payment form fields. Using a small font with lighter colors may introduce style to your form but make it extremely hard for your consumers to read what’s on the screen, especially if they are accessing the payment form from smaller screen sizes such as the ones on their smartphone.
Always remember – the clearer and more understandable your online payment form is, the more it will urge your users to use it thus indirectly getting more payments for your business from the same user.
Use a seamless format.
Online payment forms can be designed in a number of formats such as top-aligned, left-aligned and right-aligned forms. Each of these formats come with an advantage and disadvantage of their own. Top-aligned fields, for example, occupy the most space but also take the least amount of time to complete.
Right-aligned fields are slower to complete than top-aligned fields but are the perfect option for payment forms that have more fields to complete. This is the most used format in many of the top online businesses. There is also a third option of left-aligned fields which is extremely slow to complete and should only be used if your form has an extensive number of fields (which it normally shouldn’t).
Keep the payment form as simple as possible.
If you value customer privacy and want to ensure maximum security for your customers, chances are your online payment form will grow up to an enormous size in the process. However, if you don’t sort your form correctly it can grow up to be quite a nuisance for your customers.
After all, no customer wants to go through continuous payment information when they are making a transaction. That is why we suggest that you keep the form as simple as possible and dive it into multiple sections to facilitate customer ease. Be sure to add a progress bar at the end so that your customers get an idea of where they are in progress.
Store customer information for repeated uses.
If you are a large business website and know that your customers will come to purchase from you again, you can consider storing their payment form information for them (with their consent, of course). This would only help your customers in the longer run as all the transactions and purchases they do after their initial one will be extremely easy to handle because most of their information will automatically get filled out.
While this can be an extremely convenient tool for your business, you need to ensure that your customers agree to the practice as there are many customers out there that are very careful about their privacy and wouldn’t want any website to store their personal information for them.
Use payment service seals.
Businesses can’t show entire security certificates to each one of their customers to assure them they are using all security measures available to them to ensure their security and privacy. They can, however, show their customers security seals and logos from branded companies. There are various comp security companies that will be more than happy to provide their logo to you after hosting your security services for your business.
Using these logos and seals at the bottom, side or top of your online payment form can assure your customers that you are using reputable security providers to secure all of their payment transactions.
Use hints to guide your customers.
While most forms are fairly straightforward, there is still a big chance that some of your customers might get confused with the format and type of the fields in the form. Putting small hints in the form of question marks on the side of the fields or the field label themselves will allow your customers to know exactly what they are supposed to fill in the form’s respective fields.
These hints are especially helpful for people that are new to online payments or don’t have adequate language skills. Once they realize that you as a business care about customers like them to include small hints, they will make sure to use only your business for all their shopping needs.
Conclusion.
There are several aspects that you can integrate into your own online payment forms to drastically improve them and make them optimal. We hope this article was insightful for you and if it was, please consider following our website for regular updates as it will help us out immensely.