How to make your business easy to buy from

Whether your business is trying to find more customers or keep pace with growing demands, making your organization easier to buy from will foster success. Challenging economic times present an opportunity to find ways to improve how you operate. Easing the purchase process is a foundational step in this important effort.

Use these tips to improve the buying process for your customers, and learn how to streamline company operations, too.

Improve your mobile experience

Plenty of businesses with great products and good service are still lagging when it comes to the mobile shopping experience. Fixing your company's mobile presence, so it’s easy for people to learn about and buy from you on their smartphones, tablets and other devices is an essential success factor for most businesses.

Buyers of all types are spending more time with their phones and tablets — eMarketer reports that non-voice mobile usage in the U.S. will average four hours and 18 minutes a day per user this year. And, Q4 this year is expected to be the biggest mobile shopping season to date.

Several components are important for a good mobile experience:

• Text and images on the site's pages should render on a visitor's tablet or smartphone in a clear, easily readable way.
• People should be able to contact you from your mobile site, either by clicking on your phone number to initiate a call, clicking on your email address to send a message, or via a simple "contact us" form.
• Users should be able to easily do whatever action you want them to do on your mobile site, with the fewest possible clicks, whether it's to make a purchase, make a reservation, check inventory, or find your address or business hours.

To see how your site rates, you can use a free tool from Google^™ to test the mobile friendliness of your site. And, while a mobile-friendly site is important, don't deny users access to your full web presence. If the breadth of what you offer is complicated and can't easily be shown on your mobile site, consider having a button that allows them to easily toggle to view the desktop version.

Sell online

Whether it's through e-commerce, online booking, or easily connecting with someone in your company, having a convenient way for people to learn about and buy from you is essential. This is particularly important if it's difficult for customers to visit your business in person.

The first step is to decide what features you want to offer on your website. Some to consider include:

• Inventory. Can your offerings be sold online? If so, be sure that in addition to making it easy to find and search for items, customers get an accurate sense of what's in stock and available.
• Easy checkout. Can your customers select the items they want and put them into their shopping cart? Is it a simple process to create an account (if needed) and then check out to complete their order?
• Promotions. Does your site have the capability to create discount codes and promotional landing pages for sales or special offers?
• Mobile booking. Can your customers create appointments for services or to speak with someone at your business on the phone? If you have a business that requires reservations, can your customers see what times are available and quickly book their time slot?
• Reporting. Can you monitor the traffic on your site to see which pages get the most visitors, when they visited, and where they came to your site from, such as Google, an email, or a social media post?

Know your best customers

Since most companies earn their profits from a small subsection of their customer base, it's key to understand the profile of the customers that add to your bottom line.

Several indicators will show you who are your best customers, including repeat purchases, frequency of purchases, profit margin per purchase, and purchase or dollar amount spent. Once you know who adds the most to your profits, you can position your offerings, payment options and customer service to make it easy for this important group to buy.

Several different approaches can help you engage your top-tier customers:

• VIP programs. Recognize your best customers' patronage with programs designed to reward repeat and regular purchases or business. These can have different tiers based on how much and how often they spend with you.
• Special events. Invite your best customers to exclusive events, either online or in person, including product demonstrations, sales, or webinars on topics related to your business.
• Early access. Give your top-tier customers first shot at new products or services, or make sure they're the first to know when something popular is back in stock.

Make payments easy

The more ways people can buy from you, the more they'll purchase. Contactless ways to pay, in particular, are gaining steam with consumers — a recent Mastercard^® survey found eight out of 10 consumers use contactless payments. Multiple payment options, including online, credit, debit, and mobile, are just a few ways businesses make themselves easy to buy from.

Here are a few options you may want to offer:

• Pay online, pick up at store. Over three-quarters of the top-50 U.S. retailers now offer curbside pickup, which shows how much shoppers appreciate the option of buying online and picking up purchases in person.
• Mobile payments. Apps like Google Pay^® and Apple Pay^® store shoppers' credit card data on their mobile devices and allow people to make payments by holding their device over a payment terminal with near-field communications (NFC) technology.
• Contactless credit or debit cards. These let a business accept payment when the card is either tapped or waved near the terminal. For this to work, both the card and the business's terminal must have NFC technology.
• Peer-to-peer (P2P) payments. P2P enables two entities to transfer funds from a bank account or credit card. The fee paid for a transaction, if any, varies from service to service. Some of the most commonly used include PayPal^®, Zelle^®, and Venmo^™.

Provide great customer service

For 24/7/365 customer service, technology is key. At the very least, you should be easy to reach and responsive to all inquiries. Current technology makes this level of service easier than ever to offer. Some of the foundational customer service offerings include:

• Generate automated responses. Invest in plug-and-play tools that allow your website to generate an automated response to an email immediately, letting people know that you've received their email and giving them an estimated time frame of when someone will respond.
• Use an appointment scheduler. If a customer needs to speak with someone to check inventory, schedule a pickup, or request another service, an appointment scheduling plug-in on your site lets them set a time to get a call back.
• Easy contact. Make sure your phone number, email address, and physical address are easy to find on your website's homepage and other areas of your site. For mobile, make sure your phone number is enabled to allow visitors to click to call.

Making it quick and simple for customers to learn about, connect with and buy from your business is more important than ever. Use these ideas to improve the buying process for your audience today.

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