In a recent InternetRetailing webinar, £1bn in sales by December 1 – are you ready?, Chris Ross, head of ecommerce at Secure Trading, considered how retailers can take action to get ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Here’s a bulletpoint overview of the main points that they covered.
Chris Ross, head of ecommerce at Secure Trading, opened the webinar
• Chris opened the webinar with an introduction to Secure Trading, a payments management company which acts as acquirer, secure gateway and offers cyber security and PCI services.
• Black Friday: brought to the UK by Walmart and Amazon, the start of the Christmas shopping period, November 27 is expected to generate £1.07bn in UK online sales, while Cyber Monday is predicted to see £943m ecommerce turnover.
• Peak of the ecommerce year: website performance, customer payment experience, conversion rates, cyber fraud, returns, data analytics and platform redundancies are all key at this time of year. The quiet time of the year, January onwards, is a good time to look again at ensuring this foundation is strong.
Website performance
• Important to check bandwidth, while decluttering, creating clear navigation paths and ensuring that payment and checkout is easy.
Customer payment experience
• Fewer steps = more conversion.
• Tokenisation keeps card details secure.
Conversion rates – and reducing checkout abandonment
• For every 100 potential customers that visit your ecommerce site, 67 will leave empty-handed.
• Approaches to optimise checkout and payment include not limiting payment options, considering single-click checkout, card store and tokenisation, enabling impulse purchases and making sure it’s easy to buy again, and considering a single payment partner.
Pre-Christmas returns
• Tokenisation can help with processing returns.
Data analytics
• Helps businesses understand how to improve their operations when they review in 2016, driving down costs.
Platform redundancies
“We all like to think we don’t need a plan B but it’s important we have one that looks at things like uptime monitoring of the website and how your payment provider will help you stay up to receive as many transactions as possible, not only for Black Friday and Cyber Monday but for the future,” said Chris Ross.
What to look for in a payment partner
• One stop shop.
• Improving chargeback and fraud management.
• Offering customers the ability to pay with their preferred payment method.
Summing up
• Declutter and test your website.
• Keep payment tight – more than three pages in checkout reduces conversion.
• Use tokenisation to offer one-click shopping.
• Consider alternative payment types.
• Have a back-up plan.
• Consider fraud and security methods.
• Reporting for full visibility.
The presentation finished with a Q&A session. To hear and see it for yourself, watch the webinar for yourself on the Secure Trading page on our IRTV page.
