Mihails Safro, xpate CEO: The Reasons Why UX Design Matters to Merchants
With online buying available to customers all over the world, what really matters to merchants is their cross-border ecommerce sales strategy – and UX design is the key to unlocking new revenue growth
What’s most important for merchants when they’re trying to grow? Is it offering the widest product range at the lowest prices? Or having the most eye-catching advertising campaign? With online buying available to customers all over the world, what really matters to merchants is their cross-border ecommerce sales strategy – and UX design is the key to unlocking new revenue growth.
The global ecommerce landscape is getting more crowded and brutally competitive, and consumers are more impatient and demanding than ever before. The breakneck pace of payment technology innovation is putting even more pressure on merchants to offer their customers even quicker and easier payment journeys. It’s easy to forget just how much work goes on behind the scenes to get a fast checkout process in place – and the challenges of slashing the dreaded cart abandonment rate are even harder when trying to sell to international customers.
Adding localised payment methods, local currencies and optimising the payment funnel are no-brainers when trying to grow cross-border ecommerce sales. Putting these in place will undoubtedly help to attract customers and raise checkout conversions.
The customer’s view informs the best UX design
But there’s an important element that often gets overlooked. As cross-border payments get more complex, it’s not just consumers who need payments to be made as simple as possible at the checkout stage. Merchants too need to have payment gateways and platforms that are easy to use and simple for them to navigate, so they can give their customers the best experience possible. That’s why intuitive UX design should be a strategic priority for merchants who want to stand out from the crowd.
Improving the customer experience is the defining growth strategy for any online business, especially in the cross-border ecommerce space, where sales are set to hit $1.2 trillion.
Of course, every merchant wants a piece of this action, but in their expansion efforts, UX design is often an afterthought, something that can be tweaked when merchants can get around to it. But the simple fact is this: investing in better UX, whether on the front-end or back-end, as soon as possible, pays off massively in the long run.
Nobody in their right mind sets out to make it difficult for customers to buy online. Many merchants mistakenly believe that their ecommerce site need to be packed full of virtual bells and whistles, and as many interactive icons, banners and images as they can cram onto the screen.
Merchants often forget to put themselves in their customers’ shoes, especially those entering the site for the first time. What do customer see? How easy is it for them to find what they’re looking for? And can they pay in the way they want to pay?
It’s understandable that merchants become so laser-focused on selling that they forget a crucial principle. Don’t complicate things. Help customers get from start to finish in the shortest time possible. Focusing on serving, not selling.
Intuitive interactions drive optimum UX design for smoother customer journeys
Optimal UX design takes the roadmap of interactions between a customer and a merchant interface, such as the steps they take to log in or browse products, and shortens the distance and steps to make the payment journey as smooth and as frictionless as it can be.
To create smooth digital journeys, merchants need to know how their customers find them, how they move through their website, and what will entice them to complete transactions. With the right platform that can harness payment processing data in one simple-to-use portal, those UX/CX insights give merchants a goldmine of data that they can leverage to strengthen their marketing strategies, speed up onboarding, and thrill their customers with amazing incentives and unique offers tailored to what they really want.
Simplified UX design will give merchants all the insights they need to fine-tune customer checkout journeys, whether that’s adding more payment methods popular in certain countries, or by enabling localised pricing in others. These simple tweaks seem obvious, but when busy merchants are busy trying to serve customers, details like these are easy to overlook – but can make all the difference to checkout rates.
Building these customer-focused experiences can be costly and complicated for merchants which don’t have the in-house skills or resources. It’s a daunting task for small businesses who just want to get on with selling and growing. That’s why partnering with a specialist who lives and breathes fintech-focused UX design is the simplest and quickest way bring your site to life and deliver an unforgettable customer experience.
A UX-first approach will lift businesses above the crowd
At xpate, our mission is to embed simple and effective UX design in every aspect of cross-border ecommerce. It’s by simplifying complex cross-border payments for everyone that opportunities open up – making payment platforms easy to navigate means that every member of the merchant’s team can engage with sales, generate insights and come up with new ways of doing business.
We practice what we preach, which is why we refreshed our own platform and website to align the look and feel with how customers most often interacted with it. Our redesign allowed us to significantly increase the amount of page views, and conversions skyrocketed by 90%.
As the world gets more digital, UX and customer journeys will be the foundations for future growth. What will lift businesses above the competition is when their payment processes are so fast and easy that their customers forget what it’s like to wait.
