Some customers prefer to use a certain payment method, and their reasons are their own. Others are restricted in the payment methods they can use, which can also be due to several reasons — most commonly, the customer doesn’t have access to certain payment methods in their country, or they don’t have an account with a particular service (like PayPal, for example). Or maybe they do have an account, and it’s temporarily locked down because the customer was hit by a data breach.

The point is, all kinds of things happen that lead to different customers preferring certain payment methods and sometimes only having access to one. If a customer’s preferred payment method isn’t available at checkout, and they don’t have an alternate method that you accept (and that they’re willing to use), they’ll abandon their cart.

You can serve your customers better, and see more carts go through to completion, by adding more payment methods to your online store. However, you shouldn’t just add tons of payment methods in hopes your customers will use them — this clutters your checkout page and hurts performance. Instead, choose payment methods based on demand.

Evaluating Demand for Payment Methods

You can determine demand in a few ways. One consideration is your business’s location and your customers’ locations. Do you need to accept international payments? Is there a popular payment method in a country where you have a lot of customers? Alternately, is there a type of payment that’s most popular for your industry, or for your customer base?

There are some payment methods worth adding to any online store due to their growing worldwide popularity: digital wallets. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay and a few others all provide customers with a virtual wallet system in which they can pay at any participating online store with the information they’ve saved into their wallet or into their Google or Amazon account. These types of payment methods help increase conversions in another way as well, by offering the side benefit of a very fast, convenient checkout — especially on mobile.

To get the payment methods you want to offer on your online store, you’ll need to connect them to the software that runs your shopping cart. Fortunately you don’t have to do the technical stuff yourself and it just comes down to selecting them from the methods integrated into your store’s eCommerce software. 3dcart has integrations with over 160 payment processors, giving you far more choices than any other platform.