Accepting Payments

When we opened the site back in September, the quickest way to get up and running was to use PayPal for payments. It wasn't ideal for us because customers are taken away from our site to use a system which is out of our control and that we can't configure to our liking. Never the less, we thought that being a well known payment method it would be trusted. However, we found that quite a few customers who went to the checkout from their shopping cart did not complete their orders. Some days this could be as high as 50%. We weren't sure what the problem was, but think that the login and password prompts in PayPal may have put customers off who didn't realise PayPal can now take credit cards. Alternatively, it may even have been the fact that the customers were being directed to a different site which made them feel uncomfortable.

Another problem we had was with ex-pat customers ringing us from places like Spain saying that PayPal was presenting the information in Spanish which they didn't understand. At the time, we were also considering adding Google checkout as an option, but as we owned a secure site ourselves, we decided to put in the extra effort of performing the payment processing ourselves.

The main advantage to us, is that we can look after customers for the complete duration of their visit and are able to personally provide them with order completion notification and details of their orders at the end of it. Another advantage is that it also enables the customer to remain within the site until they are ready to move on. We were delighted to find that customers appear happier or more confident having the payment processing done within the site, because the completion rate is now consistently up at around 80% which is a big improvement, although there are still occasional days where prospective customers have second thoughts when getting to the checkout. The transmitted information is safe because we use a secure server (https:// with the lock symbol) and we do *not* retain card details. However, if anyone is still worried about entering credit card information via the internet, we do take orders via telephone and have done so on quite a few occasions.