Using Amazon Pay to Create a Customer-Centric Checkout Experience
Reed Hartman
Shopper experience lies at the heart of ecommerce. Businesses can succeed or fail depending on how seriously they take customer experience on their site.
From the first second shoppers reach your page to checkout and beyond, obsessing over a customer’s every move is a mindset that drives a better experience and, in turn, better sales.
In part one of this series, we talked about how broad a term customer or user experience can be. It can encompass almost any area of a merchant’s site. Site speed? Of course. Color psychology? Definitely. Product layout and placement? You bet. Put simply, a user-centric website is just easy to use.
But it can be argued that one experience holds more importance than the rest: the checkout process. If your checkout process isn’t fast, secure and easy to navigate, its likely you’re going to lose sales.
Customer Experience by the Numbers
A study from the Baymard Institute found that 48% of shoppers abandoned their cart because extra fees like shipping or taxes were too high. Another 24% said that being forced to create an account made them leave their cart behind. And 17% said that the checkout process was too long and complicated.
If you want to create a user-centric experience on your site, the checkout process is a good place to start. At BigCommerce, we work with some of the world’s largest technology partners to create an open platform that allows businesses to focus on their customers.
One of those technology partners is Amazon Pay. Our partnership gives merchants access to Amazon’s network of more than 200 million Prime subscribers and allows them to purchase with ease.
Bringing a User-Centric Mindset to the Checkout Process
Apart from just a debit or credit card, alternative payment options have gained massive popularity in recent years. These methods make checkout unequivocally easier than entering information over and over again or creating an account.
These “buy buttons” have worked their way into the mainstream by creating a faster, more efficient checkout process. In fact, Amazon Pay has been shown to be 49% faster than regular checkout experiences, according to a 2021 PYMNTS.com report.
Amazon Pay is more than a button — it also gives brands the ability to scale by taking advantage of a massive customer base that already exists within its network. There are hundreds of millions of Amazon customers around the world. Whenever Amazon users encounter this buy button option, they’re recognizing a brand they’re familiar with and trust.
When 18% of shopping carts are abandoned because of a lack of trust inputting payment information, that level of brand recognition can truly add value to a business.
Not Just a Great Experience for Customers
While Amazon Pay has its share of benefits for shoppers, it can benefit merchants, too.
Providing safety and security.
Amazon Pay is backed by the same advanced fraud protection technology and policy used on Amazon.com.
The A-to-z Guarantee protects customers when they’re purchasing products from a third-party seller using Amazon Pay. This is just another example of how merchants can benefit from the trust buyers place in Amazon.
The Payment Protection Policy (PPP) can protect merchants from chargebacks, or “charge disputes.” Merchants won’t be held liable for them if they meet all the policy requirements.
Amazon Pay allows merchants to process authorizations asynchronously, which can lead to lower decline rates for high-risk transactions without increasing the probability of fraudulent purchases.
Enhanced scalability.
Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) provides the same shipment experience shoppers trust, but for ecommerce channels outside Amazon. To learn more about Amazon MCF and BigCommerce, check out our interview with Abhi Tiwari, Director of Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment.
MCF also allows for simple, predictable fulfillment pricing, and that can help lead to fewer abandoned carts and potentially more sales in the long run.
Easy-to-use features.
Amazon Pay’s account service and tech support teams are available to help merchants solve challenges that may arise.
Amazon Pay can be easily added to your BigCommerce store with a simple API integration.
The Final Word
There are plenty of things businesses can do to improve the checkout process. They can create a lightning-fast website. They can keep their design sleek and simple. But offering a variety of safe, secure payment methods can mean the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.
Amazon Pay is a simple, easy-to-integrate payment method that offers a number of benefits, including:
Amazon security and fraud protection.
The trust and consumer recognition of the Amazon name.
Scaling opportunities with Amazon MCF.
Tech and account support.
And more.
No matter the size of your business, from a small mom and pop shop to a Fortune 100 enterprise, you can benefit from improving customer experience on your site. Amazon Pay is an excellent option for a way to improve customer experience and potentially grow sales for your business.
Reed Hartman is a Content Marketing Manager at BigCommerce, where he uses his years of research, writing and marketing experience to help inform and educate business owners on all things ecommerce.