How to Get Sales in Seconds Using Apple Pay in Your Checkout Funnel

Imagine this: 

A website visitor loves the hand-painted ceramic plates for sale in your online store. They’ve read the product description, scrolled through every picture until finally, they want to buy four to display in their home. 

Your visitor clicks “add to cart” and begins typing their card and contact information.

Then, their cell phone pings. It’s their spouse asking them to pick up little Tommy at school. Your 90 percent-converted visitor grabs their keys and walks out the door. 

They forget all about your decorative plates. 

You just lost a sale in a matter of moments because you couldn’t move your almost-customer through the checkout funnel fast enough.

These days, even the littlest inconvenience during your checkout funnel is enough to deter a buyer. Typing in a credit card is considered an unnecessary hassle now, as is typing in a password to access an account. 

The average cart abandonment rate hovers around 76 percent, which equates to a whopping $4.6 trillion dollars in foregone revenue due to hassle-prone and distracting checkout processes. 

While some bigger online stores may have the luxury of risking the occasional sale due to cart abandonment, smaller online merchants do not. Every sale matters. 

It’s for this reason that credit card-less payments, mobile-based payments, and nearly any other payment app that streamlines the way people buy products or services are on the rise. 

What is the best online payment option for small businesses? And how will these options support your efforts to decrease hassle and increase sales without sacrificing overall website experience? 

It’s all about speed and access.  

The way people buy things online is changing. In a matter of years, we’ve become a nearly cashless society. 

According to the FDIC, cash represented just 30 percent of all payments in 2017. Harvard Business Review writer Shelle Santana collaborated with payment company Square to uncover recent data that suggests cash is no longer king. Customers crave business efficiency in their checkout funnel — both on and offline. And the impending younger, tech-savvy generations will demand even greater digital payment integrations than what’s available now. 

Sure, yesterday’s mobile payment apps such as PayPal, Stripe, or Square help streamline these processes, but they’re just barely baseline solutions when considering the other payment options available now and in the future. 

These payment solutions fail to address common roadblocks such as: 

1. People who don’t have their credit card readily available
2. People who misentered their info on the fly
3. People who forgot their account login information

All these scenarios fuel dreaded frustration, causing your visitors to:

1. Jump ship to another store with easier processes
2. Return to your site once time is on their side
3. Disregard the purchase entirely

Yikes! Maybe you can grab them on the backend with an abandonment email…right? 

Don’t be the company that loses to its competition over silly things. Here’s what you should know to ensure you’re not leaving money on the table.

We already know that accelerated checkouts help create a more favorable website experience that boosts sales and generates better loyalty. A recent Spotify study proves it. In one weekend, over 400,000 people spent more than $30 million 3x faster using Shopify Pay.

So if one can assume higher revenue simply due to faster checkout speeds, integrating simple online payment options for small businesses seem like an obvious choice for merchants. 

Hassle-free checkouts of the future will mean more than just credit card payments, auto-fill forms, and stored information. 

Many people have already gone contactless with their cards. Contactless card payments, the act of touching your card to a payment terminal rather than inserting it, will be in widespread use by the end of 2019. 

But customers are already looking ahead to even faster ways to pay. This means that small online stores have to keep up or risk getting left behind. 

Still, not all payment methods circling the web right now are worthwhile to pursue. For example, how likely are we to see another bump in Bitcoin? Are your customers actively on Coinbase? Probably not. 

A survey by JPMorgan Chase found that digital wallets are still questionable by some and only 36 percent of U.S. merchants currently offer digital wallet transactions as a payment option. 

The future of e-commerce is mobile payments.

*Opportunity alert*  It’s more likely your customers have an iPhone with mobile wallet capabilities than a digital wallet in 2019.

More appropriate trends suggest that, soon, we’ll go from cashless and contactless to completely cardless by way of “mobile wallets” such as Apple Pay equipped with NFC technology. Adding a similar solution such as Google Pay would be wise too, as both options would capture almost all of the market checking out on their phones.

So what is the best solution to your checkout funnel woes?

What can you do right now to ensure you are converting every possible customer in the fastest amount of time? 

How can you make that money, make it faster, and crush the competition?

You’re most likely to generate a 30-second checkout AFTER the user has seen something about you — a review, an ad prior, a friend referring the product, etc.

The only way to do that is to create an opportunity that capitalizes on the precise moment when a user is thinking of you or your product.

Mobile payment apps such as Apple Pay and Google Pay run on the notion that fewer clicks equal more sales. Anyone with a newer Android or Apple smartphone can use these apps. All you have to do is install it to your site, which apparel company, Nine Line, says they did site-wide in under an hour.

Apple Pay works almost identically to Google Pay. Both support rewards programs, both speed up the purchasing process by allowing stored information, and neither charges fees.

Given that Apple Pay contains multiple layers of encryption and is also protected by Apple’s fingerprint technology, many say that Apple Pay is the most secure payment method out there.

Merchants might also like to know that, from a customer standpoint, users enjoy the feature enabling them to pair it with their Apple Watch, making access and usability much easier. 

Learn how to add Apple Pay to your website.

Let customers check out in your app or website faster with Google Pay. When you integrate with Google Pay, customers can pay you with any credit or debit card saved in their Google account. All it takes is a few clicks. 

Another great feature is Google Pay Passes, in which customers can digitize and keep your loyalty cards, gift cards, and offers in the same account, all of which encourage users to spend more money faster. 

Learn how to add Google Pay to your website.

Keep an eye out for Facebook’s latest ability to pay for online purchases. 

Facebook is making strides to debut the next PayPal alternative with Libra, a cryptocurrency that will be simpler to set up and act as a more efficient payment method with fewer fees. Mark Zuckerberg once said that sending money online should be as simple as sending photos. Considering that billions of people remain unbanked, Libra is designed to make it easier and cheaper for people to transfer money online using only their phones. 

One predicted possibility is that online stores will start awarding bonus discounts and “coins” to customers who sign up and pay using Libra, a strategy that will benefit the customer and the business.

In a marketplace teeming with hassles and distractions, online businesses who make it as easy as possible for their customers to buy, wins. Luckily, implementing fast, seamless checkout processes is an easy solution. 

Consider all the scenarios in which your customer could bounce from your site, then put solutions in place to ensure that never happens. Installing better online payment solutions into your buyer funnel is a great place to start.