Aside from sim­ply offer­ing addi­tion­al web­site pay­ment options, retail­ers can increase con­ver­sions in part by emu­lat­ing Ama­zon in terms of site fea­tures and con­sumer out­reach like wish lists, email nudges, stored cred­it card infor­ma­tion, and retar­get­ing.

Dig­i­tal pay­ments com­pa­ny Skrill has released a study that found 28 per­cent of UK con­sumers aban­don online pur­chas­es because the web­site does not offer their pre­ferred method of pay­ment. Per Skrill, this fig­ure ris­es to 32 per­cent among 18- to 24-year-olds who are more like­ly to use pay­ment options like dig­i­tal wal­lets. As a result, Skrill says the les­son for online retail­ers is to pro­vide mul­ti­ple pay­ment options in order to dri­ve growth. “Our data shows while busi­ness­es are invest­ing huge sums get­ting cus­tomers to the point of mak­ing a pur­chas­ing deci­sion, they risk not com­plet­ing the sale if they only accept card pay­ments,” said Chan­tal Willis, vice pres­i­dent of eCom­merce at Skrill, in a release. “They must ensure they have sys­tems in place to cater for the half of the pop­u­la­tion who pre­fer alter­na­tive pay­ment meth­ods. Giv­en online stores attract cus­tomers from any­where in the world, the need to offer a wide range of pay­ment options is absolute­ly cru­cial.” But is this real­ly the key to CRO? Accord­ing to Lar­ry Marine, direc­tor of user expe­ri­ence at Intu­itive Design Group, which includes usabil­i­ty, prod­uct inno­va­tion and user expe­ri­ence design con­sul­tants, online retail­ers must first under­stand how con­sumers use ecom­merce sites. “Rarely does some­one go to the web and buy some­thing on the first try. Usu­al­ly they do some inves­ti­ga­tion,” Marine said. “They go to dif­fer­ent web­sites and look at prod­ucts and put things in their carts as way to keep track of the things they select. That accounts for most of the aban­don­ment – they just use the cart to keep track of things they like.” Ergo, Marine said there’s an innate design issue at play because con­sumers still don’t have a way to go to a web­site and keep track of an item they like with­out putting it into a cart. Here are eight expert tips for CRO mas­tery.

1. Enable A Wish List Feature

Even though Marine notes Amazon’s Wish Lists are imper­fect, he also said retail­ers should have some kind of tem­po­rary hold­ing bin such as a wish list fea­ture that lets retail­ers know what con­sumers are inter­est­ed in.

2. Be More Problem-Oriented Than Solution-Oriented

Marine said most retail­ers orga­nize their sites incor­rect­ly and are more solu­tion- than prob­lem-ori­ent­ed. “Most retail­ers think cus­tomers know what they want and orga­nize their web­sites by, ‘Here’s the prod­uct,’ so you have to go look at all the dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion about the prod­ucts to deter­mine if it’s right for you,” Marine said. He thinks retail­ers should instead adopt an approach like the one used by the Kel­ley Blue Book web­site. “When you go there, they ask ques­tions about what your needs are…how much is my car worth, how much should I pay for used car. Instead of, ‘Here’s info to buy a used car,’ they say, ‘Here’s a but­ton so the user can select what their prob­lem is so they can select the solu­tion,’” he adds. “Often­times, when we go to web­sites, we’re learn­ing about dif­fer­ent aspects of prod­ucts that are use­ful to us. Web­sites are very poor at help­ing con­sumers learn what right prod­uct is for them.”

3. Offer Enough Payment Options, But Not Too Many

In addi­tion, Marine said con­sumers are some­times turned off in the check­out expe­ri­ence because of an unfriend­ly user inter­face that has a cum­ber­some form to fill out for cred­it card infor­ma­tion or the check­out sequence doesn’t seem nor­mal, which makes con­sumers won­der if there’s some­thing fishy going on. “While some peo­ple can’t find the pay­ment method they want, oth­er times they find it, but it doesn’t look right and doesn’t give them a sense of secu­ri­ty and they bail,” Marine said. There­fore, he rec­om­mends look­ing at Ama­zon and Pay­pal, which have famil­iar check­out sequences. For his part, Charles Nicholls, founder of real-time behav­io­r­i­al mar­ket­ing com­pa­ny See­Why, said the Skrill study is a bit sim­plis­tic because con­sumers use mul­ti­ple devices on the path to pur­chase. In fact, per See­Why data, Nicholls says on the 4,000 U.S. ecom­merce sites the firm tracks, con­sumers use an aver­age of 2.6 devices. “It’s rather sim­plis­tic to say you need to offer more pay­ment choic­es. That may or may not be true,” Nicholls said. “If you offer a wide num­ber, the con­ver­sion rate could go down because there’s too much choice.”

4. Look At The Way Consumers Convert On Different Devices

Con­sumers use dif­fer­ent devices for dif­fer­ent things in both the search­ing and con­ver­sion process and retail­ers need to opti­mize for both phas­es across dif­fer­ent devices, Nicholls said. Accord­ing to Nicholls, for every 100 peo­ple that arrive via desk­top, 11 will get to the cart and 2.6 will con­vert. “Basi­cal­ly that means that about 72 per­cent will bail, hav­ing got to the cart and they don’t go all the way through to con­ver­sion and that’s nor­mal,” Nicholls said. The rea­son con­sumers don’t buy includes because they’re sim­ply not yet ready and it has noth­ing to do with pay­ment choic­es or price, he adds, echo­ing Marine. “They put it in there because it’s eas­i­er than using wish lists,” Nicholls said.

5. Optimize Search For Phones

On smart­phones, on the oth­er hand, Nicholls said “all bets are off.” Of the 100 that arrive via smart­phones only 8 will get to the cart. That sig­nals a need to opti­mize around search­ing on phones and make the process eas­i­er to get through to the cart. The vast major­i­ty of smart­phone users typ­i­cal­ly bail at the page imme­di­ate­ly after the shop­ping cat, which is where users typ­i­cal­ly have to log in or reg­is­ter or enter billing and ship­ping infor­ma­tion. “If you’re hold­ing a phone in your hand, how are you going to hold a cred­it card and enter num­bers?” Nicholls asks. “You need a desk, so you will do it when you get back to a desk­top.”

6. Consider Alternate Payments

There­fore, Nicholls said alter­nate pay­ments can have a dra­mat­ic impact on con­ver­sion rates on smart­phones in par­tic­u­lar, but it’s not as sim­ple as say­ing retail­ers should add more pay­ment choic­es because, as not­ed, too many choic­es can also be a prob­lem. Smart­phones are vital­ly impor­tant because con­sumers spend more time on them than any­where else and con­ver­sion rates are grow­ing 4 times faster than tablets and 14 times faster than desk­tops, Nicholls said. Alter­nate pay­ments on smart­phones can yield a dou­bling of con­ver­sion rate on the device, but, at the same time, there’s no obvi­ous sin­gle alter­nate pay­ment retail­ers should use. Pay­pal has the most crit­i­cal mass, but con­sumers have “neg­a­tive bag­gage asso­ci­at­ed with Pay­pal,” Nicholls said. Apple Pay could also be inter­est­ing, as could the sim­ple option of stor­ing cred­it card details on a web­site, he adds.

7. Find A Way To Cross Devices

Per Nicholls, Ama­zon is doing 7 times more mobile rev­enue than its near­est com­peti­tor because it com­bines remar­ket­ing with email nudges, which are fre­quent­ly opened on smart­phones and help car­ry the iden­ti­ty of the per­son and the con­text across devices. “This is real­ly slick – they have crossed devices,” Nicholls said. “So I was look­ing at a new pair of shoes on my desk­top, but now I’m on my smart­phone and I receive an email, but now I’m on my mobile and [they are] tap­ping into a few spare min­utes, which elim­i­nates the search­ing process. I hit one but­ton and add [the item] to the cart and in the Ama­zon expe­ri­ence, I hit one more but­ton to check out…” This process makes it incred­i­bly sim­ple for con­sumers, but Nicholls said many retail­ers don’t want to have to deal with PCI com­pli­ance even though “the sin­gle [best] way to dri­ve con­ver­sions is to com­bine remar­ket­ing and stored account details as a way to cross chan­nels.” How­ev­er, if a retail­er can’t do that, Nicholls rec­om­mends look­ing at alter­nate pay­ments, but, again, said to be aware of con­sumer bag­gage relat­ed to Pay­Pal and to not offer a huge mul­ti­tude of pay­ment options. “If you do too much, it caus­es prob­lems on the small screen,” he adds.

8. Pay Attention To The Time Of Day

Per Nicholls, in gen­er­al, the con­ver­sion rate on desk­top is high­er at most times of day than on smart­phones and tablets. The excep­tion, how­ev­er, is around 10 p.m. ET, which Nicholls dubs “the chardon­nay effect,” which means it’s the end of the day, con­sumers are on the couch and they may be watch­ing TV and/or using a tablet and are more relaxed and con­ver­sion rates on tablets go up. “They may be hav­ing a glass of some­thing, too, and, need­less to say, it loosens up the purse strings and away you go,” he said. “If you’re brows­ing some­thing at work at lunchtime, you decide you’ll look lat­er, and then you’re nice and relaxed and bang, bang, bang, out it goes.”