PayKickStart Shopping Cart Checklist: Can Your Online Shopping Cart Do This? | Affliate Marketing
On the surface, selling something online — whether it’s digital or physical — seems like a reasonably straightforward affair. The customer arrives at the website, adds an item or two to his or her virtual shopping cart, and proceeds with the checkout process by entering his or her payment information. The order is received by the merchant, the product is delivered, and everyone is a happy camper, right?
While robust and reliable basics are an absolute necessity, they are ultimately insufficient if you want your online business to thrive. You want to offer the best possible customer experience, but you also don’t want to leave any money on the table. It is in your best interest to consider the most valuable features that online shopping cart solutions should have.
This is exactly what you will find with the all-new PayKickStart shopping cart solution.
However, to simply call PayKickStart a ‘shopping cart’ solution would be a big mistake. There are actually many more features and built-in benefits than you could ever imagine. Aligning with the title of this article “Can your shopping cart do this?”, we are going to walk through a list of ultimate features and tools that every shopping cart should have. If your online marketing and business isn’t currently using these features below, it’s time for you to take the leap over to PayKickStart.
One-Time and Subscription Payments
This will depend on the type of product or service that you are selling, but it’s critically important that your shopping cart software can support both types of payments. Recurring payments can be a tremendous source of revenue for your company, especially since there are no additional costs involved in customer acquisition. This steady cash flow can be much more predictable and consistent too, which puts you in a better position if you are seeking investors.
Subscription Saver
Encouraging your customers to sign up for a subscription is a good thing, because it means the payments will be processed automatically at set intervals, whether that’s monthly, annually, or over any other period. As convenient as this may be, customer billing details can become invalid over time, like if their credit card expires or they move to a different address. Did you know that about 30 percent of rebills fail?
Prevent this from becoming a problem in the first place. An automated email sequence can ensure that all customers keep their billing information up to date, so every payment goes through as it should.
Free and Paid Trials
Particularly for businesses that operate on the SaaS model with monthly subscriptions, offering a free trial especially can be one of the most effective tactics for getting your “foot in the door.” Many customers are hesitant to commit to a one-year subscription or even pay for a month-to-month service until they know what they are getting. A free trial, either with or without full functionality, lets you acquire that key customer information and switching them over to the paid subscription is a piece of cake.
Pre-Filled Checkout Page
The fewer “friction points” you can have during a transaction, the more likely a customer is going to complete that transaction. This is even true with repeat customers. Arguably, it’s especially true with repeat customers. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to complete a transaction on Amazon, for instance? They already have your shipping and payment information, so you never need to enter it again. The easier the process, the better.
Payment Plans
There is a reason why the “five easy payments of” type business model has existed for so long and across so many industries. Some customers simply cannot afford the up-front cost of higher-priced items and, even among those who can, they might not want to have a single outlay of cash quite that substantial. if your shopping cart offers the option of alternative pricing options, you have a much better shot at appealing to more potential customers.
Address Auto-Complete
Much like having a pre-filled checkout page, you always create a better customer experience when the process is as fast and simple as possible. A great feature that you’ll find with PayKickStart is auto-complete for addresses. Customers simply start typing in their address and the form is able to predict and auto-fill the rest of it. This also ensures that the address format is consistent across all orders.
Upgrade and Downgrade
The situation for a customer when they first decided to subscribe to your SaaS may not be the same situation for the customer a few weeks, months, or years down the road. In an ideal world, customer needs increase and they’ll want to have a plan that scales alongside their requirements. Instead of requiring a customer to go through the whole order process again, it is paramount that the upgrade process is far simpler and more seamless. Again, the fewer friction points, the better.
Likewise, it is far more desirable if a customer chooses to downgrade his or her services than it is for them to leave you altogether. Again, the downgrading process should be easy and frictionless too.
Exit-Intent
In the business of the Internet, there’s something called a bounce rate. In the context of e-commerce, one of the biggest challenges is overcoming the abandoned shopping cart. The customer has nearly gone through the whole transaction, only to leave the site for some inexplicable reason. This can account for up to 25% of potential customers! By using a simple popup, you get one more chance at closing the sale.
Pending Order Follow-up
Perhaps that exit-intent popup wasn’t enough to convince the customer to complete the transaction. Maybe he or she had every intention of completing the sale, but had to leave the computer for whatever reason. This does not have to result in a lost sale! If you’ve got their email address, you can send out a “pending order” email as a follow-up reminder. Having such a feature integrated into your shopping cart can recapture those potential sales!
Checkout Page Library
Not everyone is a web designer or web developer. Most people aren’t. That doesn’t mean you can’t have an amazing checkout page that is proven to work! When selecting e-commerce software for your site, it’s incredibly useful to have access to a library of pre-designed checkout pages and pop-up widget templates that are ready to go right out of the box.
Translation and Currencies
You might assume that your primary demographic is located in a specific geographic region, spending a certain currency and defaulting to English. And that may be true, but it really doesn’t take much to open up to different languages, currencies and regions when you have an e-commerce tool that automatically supports such variations with no extra effort on your part. Again, it’s about minimizing friction and making sure you don’t lose any sales over small details.
Sales and VAT Tax
Whether you deal mostly domestically in the United States or you sell to international customers, keeping up to date with sales and VAT compliance laws can feel like a challenge. This is especially true when taxes can vary from state to state, region to region. It’s far more convenient when your online shopping cart updates all of this information automatically.
1-Click Upsells and Order Bumps
Don’t leave any money on the table! Did you know that having 1-click upsells as part of your natural transaction process can boost conversions by as much as 40 percent? Suggesting additional products to buy at checkout can double your sales! If a customer is already interested in product A, they’d be a natural fit for product B (even if they didn’t know they were). You just have to nudge them along and make it as easy as possible.
Want to convert those fence-sitters into actual buyers? The option to create coupons within your landing page and order form pages exist as well. Sometimes all they need is a time-sensitive coupon that increases the level of urgency. No one wants to miss out on a good deal, so having this kind of functionality built into your e-commerce solution can increase sales significantly.
Integrations
Do you already use various third-party applications like email autoresponders, webinar platforms or fulfillment services? It’s important that all of these tools are able to work with one another in a seamless and easy-to-manage way, so you don’t waste your time with logistics and administration, manually updating data across platforms. They should all just work together.
With so many of us already using different membership platforms and online payment gateways, it’s important to always use a new solution that is easy to integrate within these other platforms as well. As you can see through the screenshot below, PayKickStart easily integrates with the likes of Paypal, Stripe, Ontraport, Kajabi, Aweber, Teachable and many other CMS and payment solutions.
Best of all, through the use of tools like Zapier, many of these integrations can be accomplished with just a few clicks of a button!
Affiliate Features and Tools
One of the fastest, most powerful, and most cost-effective ways to grow your online business is by offering an affiliate marketing program. And one of the great strengths of a solution like PayKickStart — you can help promote it with 50% commissions on the first year and 40% recurring commissions for life — is the amazing wealth of tools it offers to empower such a relationship.
The ability to track and pay commissions is built right into the system, including the ability to deliver instant, delayed and lifetime commissions. This kind of flexibility, combined with an easy way to share marketing materials with affiliates, empowers you with the ability to grow your customer base in a sustainable and profitable manner.
How to Get Started with PayKickStart
As you can see, there are plenty of amazing features and benefits of using a solution like PayKickStart to expand your business into a whole new area. To help better understand this process and start implementing these methods into your own business, I highly recommend you take a moment to attend the next upcoming webinar from Mark Thompson and how to take advantage of everything PayKickStart has to offer. Best of all, it’s free to attend!
There’s more to a shopping cart than just putting through a simple order. It’s about extracting as much value as possible while offering the best customer experience. You just need to have the right tool for the job.
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