3 Reasons Why You Should Offer As Many Payment Options As Possible

As you may have noticed there are roughly 37,000,000,000 different options for accepting payment online. Everything from classic credit card companies like Visa and American Express, to options like PayPal and Amazon Pay, to even cryptocurrencies like BitCoin or Ethereum, and it can all be a massive hassle to decide which payment methods you should accept and which to turn down. There are some further details that we will absolutely cover after this introductory paragraph, but the short answer is you should accept as many as is remotely possible for you.

More Payment Options Means More Customers

This seems pretty straightforward, but the more payment options you have, the fewer people will get to your checkout, see you don’t take their preferred payment method, and abandon the product in the cart and go find somewhere that will take their preferred method. If you only offer limited payment options you may even lose customers that prefer those options if they view such a limited selection as outdated, which may cause them to worry about the security of your ecommerce marketplace, and again cause them to go somewhere else to purchase the product to fit their need. It is absolutely crucial in the modern age to accept as many methods of payment as you possibly can, but there is still some nuance there.

Consider Your Intended Market

If you’re selling electronics it is significantly more important to consider accepting cryptocurrency than it is if you’re selling yarn and wool. While it is true that you can lose some sales if you’re not accepting BitCoin while selling your fancy alpaca wool, it is far less likely than if you are selling graphics cards and processors. It is likely obvious to someone reading blogs about ecommerce that wool and computer parts will have radically different audiences, but just in case I will state it outright. You need to consider your audience when you are thinking about which payment methods to accept.

Ecommerce Is Booming

I have covered this before from a lot of angles so I’m just going to touch on it here, because it’s still important, but ecommerce is booming right now, which means more people than ever are buying things online, even as the covid pandemic winds down in many places, ecommerce is not winding down with it. You have a wider audience than you ever have had the opportunity to have, and that means you need to be accepting as many payment methods as possible to take advantage of such a wide audience.

Conclusion

The conclusion isn’t anything surprising or new, it has been true for as long as we’ve had alternate payment methods. In fact, our modern system of commerce is borne from the barter system, where you would just trade what you produce for whatever you needed. Which is, when broken down to its basest level, just accepting a bunch of different payment methods for the good that you produce. Diversity in payment systems is ultimately healthy for both the consumer and the marketplace, and it is my recommendation that you embrace it wholeheartedly.