If you are selling products or services on your WordPress website, the most important element of your site is the payment form.
In this blog post, we’ll show you ways how you can reduce friction in your WordPress payment forms so your customers will spend their well-earned money on your business without holding back!
Keep your WordPress form simple!
Just like you, your customers are very busy people. If you want to reduce friction on your WordPress payment forms, you want to keep things on your form simple. Forget about collecting tons of data, and remove those unnecessary fields!
If you display too many fields and require too much information from your customers, they will leave in the speed of light. And with a 70% average cart abandonment rate, you definitely don’t want to put yourself into that situation! So what can you do?
Offer a guest checkout
You’ve probably been there…Creating an account to make a purchase is tiring, and leads to abandonment. So if there is no clear benefit to creating an account, give your visitors the power to checkout as a guest. If you don’t, it could be hurting your business.
On the other hand, adding a guest checkout might not always be a good idea. Sometimes it can do more harm than good. It is for you to decide what option works the best for you and consider things such as the type of customers you have, frequency of orders, number of repeated customers, and such.
Hide and show form fields
If you are using registration forms that also take payments for occasional events you’ll find yourself in a need to hide specific fields for a user that are not necessary.
This can be achieved with the Conditional Logic add-on. The perfect example is if the customer’s billing address is the same as his shipping address. When you check the box that indicates that it’s not the same address, a new set of fields appears for you to enter the billing address into.
The billing address fields are dynamic fields. There when you need them, gone when you don’t.
Break your form into steps
Registration forms or order forms with payment tend to contain a lot of information and might overwhelm your visitors in the first place.
To reduce this psychological friction, multi-step forms come in very handy. They let you split these long forms into multiple steps and decrease the form abandonment.
Our Multi-Steps Forms add-on lets you break any longer form into multi-page form, you can drag and drop fields between pages, add breadcrumb navigation, a progress bar, and loads more!
Keep your customers on your site
There is an excellent way to reduce friction on your WordPress payment forms. Instead of sending your visitors to another site to complete a payment form, use a payment system that allows you to keep your customers on your site without redirecting them somewhere else. After all, you already spent a lot of time and energy getting people on your website so why send them away when you don’t have to?
With a payment gateway such as Authorize.net, your customers won’t be redirected away from the site when they complete payment. You can easily create a pop-up on your site with the payment form and keep the site visitor engaged on your site while they submit the payment.
Another big advantage is the ability to accept user-chosen recurring donations. With other processors, users have to choose from pre-selected amounts. With Authorize.net, your site’s visitors can enter their own amounts. Isn’t that great?
Reduce friction with secure checkout
There are many site visitors who abandon payment forms because they don’t feel secure. We have seen an increase in scams where scammers are trying to steal financial information from payment forms so they’re right to be fearful.
Don’t give them the reason, and make sure you protect their data by installing an SSL certificate on your site. This will make sure all the information that passes back and forth is encrypted and your site visitors will feel secure.
Another great way to reduce friction on your WordPress form is to use a secure and flexible way to accept credit card payments. Stripe has become a global online payment processor that is trusted by thousands of businesses as all transactions are SSL protected.
With our Stripe add-on, you can easily connect your WordPress forms with your Stripe account and accept credit card payments directly from your WordPress website using the secure Stripe Checkout process.
Offering several payment methods
According to Baymard’s quantitative study of reasons for checkout abandonment collected in 2021, 7% of visitors had abandoned a checkout during the past three months because the site didn’t offer their desired payment option. In fact, 89% of sites offer at least one alternative to credit card payments.
You don’t have to offer every possible payment method to your customers, but if you are limiting yourself to only one, you are leaving money on the table. Moreover, being dependent on a single payment provider creates a risk of becoming inoperational if the payment provider you offer experiences issues.
Having more payment options lead to increased conversions and decreased cart abandonment. Giving a choice of payment to your customers results in more loyal and repeat customers who are more likely to return to your store if they know they can pay the way they want.
Accept multiple payment methods in Ninja Forms
Want to offer multiple payment methods on your WordPress form? All you need is our free core Ninja Forms plugin, Conditional Logic add-on, and integration to connect your payment system with your WordPress website.
Using the Conditional Logic add-on, you can give your users the option to select their preferred payment method. Simply add a Radio List field to your form that offers the available payment options to choose from.
You can also use Select Image Field to let users select their preferred method. This is the field where you can upload images for the payment icons, customize the layout, and display the icons whether horizontally or vertically. You’ll want to make sure the option for Allow multiple selections is turned off.
Once you set up the list field selection, the second step is to Add a Collect Payment action for each payment option and use Conditional Logic on each action so that only the one selected in the Radio List fires.
We offer the following payment integrations: Stripe, PayPal Checkout, Recurly, Elavon, and Authorize.net. Remember you can purchase our add-ons individually but you can find them bundled in our memberships if you need more than one add-on!
Display a clear payment button
When your customers finish inputting their information, you want to be sure you put a clear message on the buttons so they understand exactly what will happen when they click the button.
Spare them the ambiguous phrasing such as Submit and use clear language like Place your order, Submit payment, or Complete checkout. This is not time to be very creative here but you do want to use a color that stands out and that matches your website’s theme too.
You can easily customize the style and text of your button with our Layout & Styles add-on. If you want to learn how to style your CTA or any button using this add-on, check our blog post How to Style Your WordPress Forms (Easy Examples).
Don’t forget the Thank You Page
If your customer made a purchase on your site, congratulations! However, it doesn’t stop there. The thank you page can be a great way to deepen connections with your site visitors right after they’ve taken action.
On this page, you can give them an idea of what to expect, or even a message that solidifies the sale and helps the customer feel good about the purchase they just made.
You can also encourage them to buy related products to what they just purchased, offering a coupon code for the next purchase and start building customer loyalty.
Want to learn how to set up a thank you page in Ninja Forms? Check this article where we’ll show you how you can set up a Thank You Page, how to add your page as a goal in Google Analytics, and more!
You’ve just learned tips on how to reduce friction in WordPress payment forms
We hope you enjoyed the reading and learned something extra to help you reduce friction on your WordPress payment forms. Now it’s time to apply the tips you’ve just learned!
Additionally, we have some great reads for you about WordPress payment forms, so make sure to check out our article on How to Create a WordPress Payment Form with our free Calculations feature, or How to Easily Accept Payments in WordPress.
Are you a non-profit organization? Then, you might be interested in reading our article Want to Accept Donations with WordPress?
