High Risk Merchants Guide to Creating the Perfect Shopping Experience

I am doing more research on high risk merchant account owners' websites these days. The reasons as to why people leave the shopping cart before they make it to the checkout lane are not without solutions. Most of the shopping experience is built around the psychology of buying and selling online.

HIGH RISK MERCHANTS' GUIDE TO CREATING THE PERFECT SHOPPING EXPERIENCE

So many reasons why people leave the online shopping cart halfway while picking goods. The scenario is similar to shopping on a local supermarket -- with negligible differences. The bottom line is to make it easy for your customers to shop. For example, would you fall in a long checkout line with only a six pack beer, a bag of crackers and small cash in your hand? To make things easy, let them pay at the express lane where cash is accepted and only a few items are processed.

Some people aren't really a big fan of shopping but with one e-commerce website after another being built, it's now just a few clicks away to buying without practically leaving the house. If it's so easy to lure even the laziest shoppers online, why do you still have a low conversion rate? Doesn't it bother you that if only you knew a few more insights your sales could double in no time?

I am doing more research on high risk merchant account owners' websites these days. The reasons as to why people leave the shopping cart before they make it to the checkout lane are not without solutions. Most of the shopping experience is built around the psychology of buying and selling online. People sometimes visit your store only to look at prices, linger for 5 seconds to browse your catalog, then hop to another store to do the same thing. Others are simply lured by advertising. These are situations you can't control. A mom may be browsing an online store for baby product and suddenly hears the baby gurgle and scream. She attends to her and comes back, flips to another web page, forgetting what she's looking for in the first place.

There are, however, shopping cart issues that you can control. Among a few are:

1. Operating system and browser compatibility

2. Catalog description/ Product presentation

3. Payment type acceptance (credit card, MOTO, e-checks, etc.)

4. Complexity/simplicity of browsing to checkout process

5. Security

Now if your visitors (a.k.a. potential buyers) come into your store and see that the prices or the products are too ridiculous for their budget and taste, that is a different problem to address! Many high risk merchants confuse the shopping cart as a processor or management tool for selling their products. It is not. According to Michael Bloch, it simply “acts as a front end which passes information via a secure connection (another service) to a payment gateway”. A payment gateway processes the sale through exchange of financial information with the high risk merchant account provider and other networks involved in the transaction.

Other issues such as the price, products stocks, or shipping costs are beyond the scope of the shopping cart's capability. It is for you to figure out your rates but when it comes to the shopping experience, take feedbacks and build the shopping cart according to your customers' preferences. Make it technically foolproof. Some smart shopping cart programmers would actually put the information box on the side of the product list so that the users would merely input their credit card details instantly instead of clicking for the shopping cart page's link. As always the rule is, the simpler the better.