With more than $3.5 trillion in worldwide sales during 2019, ecommerce is a booming industry. Are you tapping into your company’s full online potential by offering multiple options for payment processing? If not, now is the time to get started.

Why you should offer multiple online payment methods.

Not everyone pays for purchases the same way. Although credit and debit cards were still the most popular payment methods for U.S. shoppers in 2019, consumers around the world are beginning to gravitate toward other options like PayPal, Alipay, and mobile wallets.

What does this mean for your ecommerce business? It depends on where the majority of your customers are located and how you want to grow your audience. Offering customers more ways to pay is a major factor in expanding your customer base. Whether you’re trying to reach a younger generation, cater to a more tech-savvy crowd, or expand into global markets, the payment methods you offer influence the type (and number) of customers you attract.

Once they start shopping on your site, customers benefit from having multiple payment options in many ways, including:

• Being able to choose the most familiar way to pay.
• Faster checkout with fewer forms and clicks.
• The sense of security that comes from paying with trusted or preferred methods. 

These perks can prompt larger orders, while turning first-time buyers into happy repeat customers. Meanwhile, you get the benefit of less abandoned carts, fewer fees, and a consistent flow of cash from numerous payment channels.

The ecommerce payment methods you should be offering in 2020.

The best online payment methods are those with which your customers are already familiar and comfortable. After all, it doesn’t make sense to invest in implementing something no one is going to use. Pay attention to how your customers already prefer to pay, monitor trends in the industry, and start expanding into new territory with the most cost-effective of these six options.

Credit and debit cards.

For U.S. businesses, credit and debit cards remain the most-recognized and most-used payment methods both online and off. The majority of consumers have at least one card and trust the security of major credit card companies when making purchases.

Credit card processing is one of the easiest payment methods to set up for ecommerce. If you already have a point of sale system for a physical store, or you use a mobile payment solution, there’s likely to be an option to integrate the same system into your website. If not, it’s easy to find an online payment processor or ecommerce platform equipped for credit card payments.

Mobile wallets.

Are you looking to attract more young consumers? Add mobile wallets to your payment options. Millennials and Generation Z account for 72% of all mobile payments, so it’s a good way to increase brand awareness among these generations.

As with third-party checkouts, integration simplifies mobile wallet use. Choose a payment processor with the tools to accept mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. Then, enable the option for these payments at checkout to allow customers to pay with cards they’ve already saved on their devices.

Mobile payments streamline transactions for the 49% of consumers who shop from their phones. Best of all, because there’s no need to enter additional information, it only takes a couple of taps to complete a purchase.

Electronic invoices.

If you primarily offer services or subscriptions to your customers, skip the paper and send digital invoices directly to their inboxes. Customers can click through from these invoices to your site to complete payment. Offer automatic payment processing for recurring services to ensure you get paid on time every month.

Electronic gift cards.

Gift cards were the most-requested wish list item among fifty-nine percent of respondents to the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics annual survey in 2019. Do you need any better reason to add this payment option? You can make extra money from last-minute holiday gift card sales and attract new customers at the same time. Gift card recipients pay by choosing the gift card or promotional code option at checkout and using the code from the card to debit the amount from the total cost of the purchase.

Multiple options for payment processing are available to allow you to implement one or more of these consumer-friendly payment methods. It’s not necessary to offer every new and novel payment type; start with the ones your customers have been asking for, and add more as your audience grows. Just remember: always stay focused on the customer experience to get the best results.