eCommerce merchants frequently run into issues with basket abandonment, low conversion and account creation. Amazon Pay easily addresses these problems by providing a fast, trusted and convenient checkout that shoppers know and love, familiar to them from Amazon.com. This article presents 6 more ways to reduce checkout friction that you should know about.
- Do not request any additional information that is already provided by Amazon Pay
One of the major benefits of Amazon Pay is that it allows your customers to check out without typing in any redundant information. Make sure that you aren’t asking your customers to provide any details that will also be provided by Amazon Pay. For example, you don’t need to ask your customers for their address, email or payment information. However, you might want to consider a form fill for a phone number from the customer in case the number Amazon Pay has on file is invalid. See scopes on this page for more information on the customer details you can request.
- Incorporate your brand logo
You have the option to create a more branded experience for your customers by including your brand logo at checkout. You can upload your logo inside Amazon Seller Central, your account management portal, which will allow your customers to see it when they click on Amazon Pay to start the checkout process. By taking advantage of this functionality, you create more continuity during the transaction, which can result in higher conversions, improving the trust you’ve established with the customer throughout the final stages of the shopping experience. If you haven’t uploaded your brand logo already, you can do so right away by signing into Seller Central and visiting the Integration Central page. You can also check out this video to get a quick overview of how to change the logo for your account.
- Review the checkout experience for Amazon Pay
You should reduce customer friction by ensuring that the Amazon Pay button appears above the fold on both the basket and checkout pages. You can also place the Amazon Pay button on a product page, giving your customer an early opportunity to begin and complete checkout. On an order review page, customers can be very hesitant to place their orders. You should make customers feel confident by clearly displaying the delivery address and payment option they have chosen with Amazon Pay; you can use the “Payment Descriptor” value provided by the Amazon Pay APIs to represent the buyer-selected payment instrument. See here for more details on how to optimise your checkout experience.
- Implement login services
In eCommerce, account creation is a major point of friction: Customers can be wary about sharing their details with unfamiliar online stores. Amazon’s commissioned research from the Baymard Institute shows that customers are highly reluctant to provide data if there is no explanation for why that information is required. In fact, according to a recent KPMG survey, 68% of US citizens were worries about the quantity of data being collected from them online.[1]
What’s more, customers don’t want to spend extra time creating another account, or having to remember another username and password. This is part of the reason why customers have consistently placed their trust in Amazon, and we want you to enjoy benefits of this trust as well. Offering Amazon Pay as an identity service at the time of login provides a trusted way for your customers to securely create an account. Additionally, your customers can conveniently and securely sign in to your store on their future visits by using this service. See this page for more details on how to implement Amazon Sign-in.
- The sandbox environment is your best friend
As the proverb goes “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure”. Similarly, testing in sandbox is better than debugging issues in production where buyers can be affected. Make sure you thoroughly test your checkout flows and payment processes before going live with Amazon Pay. Amazon Pay’s sandbox environment offers an easy way to simulate a variety of payment scenarios, so you can be confident your system will handle these scenarios correctly, without actually processing payments. Declines are handled automatically in most cases with Amazon Pay. You can review all the different sandbox scenarios on this page
Amazon Pay also allows you to register a developer account, which only has access to the Sandbox environment. You do have the option of completing registration later and enabling the Production environment, but you can use the developer account to quickly access the APIs and test Amazon Pay in the Sandbox environment. See this page to learn how to register for a developer account.
Did you know? If your system generates an Order ID only after the payment is confirmed, you can call the Update Charge Permission API once to update the Amazon Pay order details after the payment. See this page for further details.
[1] CPO Magazine: “KPMG Reports Lack of Corporate Data Responsibility Eroding Consumer Trust, Preventing Users From Sharing Data”, URL: https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/kpmg-reports-lack-of-corporate-data-responsibility-eroding-consumer-trust-preventing-users-from-sharing-data/