How to Accept Credit Cards Online and Keep Your Customers Happy

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No matter how many digital payment innovations enter the market, your business must still accept credit cards — leaving you with an ongoing challenge: how to accept credit cards online or offline without adding friction points.

Friction points, in the world of payments, are those little bits of doubt that make someone stop and think about their purchase a little longer, increasing the chance the customer will bail on the experience altogether.

Customers don’t like filling out lengthy forms with all their credentials over and over again, and they don’t particularly like entering their credit card numbers on sites they haven’t established trust with. So how can businesses get over these sticking points?

Reduce Clicks, Forms and Unnecessary Fields With Credit Cards Online

Less is more when thinking about how to accept credit cards online. Whether it’s a B2B or B2C commerce experience, the payments process should be identical: frictionless, fast and secure.

Reducing clicks and the number of forms from cart to checkout, and shortening the number of fields to fill out are a few things to think about when establishing your online credit card payments protocol. One way to achieve this is by offering both traditional credit cards and digital payments options at checkout.

Embrace Credit Cards, But Also Digital Payments

Knowing how to accept credit cards isn’t just about the physical card. Today’s payments options are no longer constrained to having a wallet or credit card nearby. Plenty of digital payments innovations have paved the way for you to start thinking differently about what it means to accept credit cards online.

Options like Visa Checkout, PayPal or MasterPass (linked to credit/debit cards or bank accounts) allow the user to validate their credentials in just a few clicks and without having to re-enter any sensitive data. Because the user has already established trust with those payment methods, they don’t have to worry about entering details on yet another site. Digital payments options also have added security conveniences, like biometrics and TouchID authentication.

From the business perspective, supplementing your credit card payment strategy with digital payments gives consumers more options of how they want to pay. This flexibility can increase the chance they’ll not only complete their initial checkout but become repeat customers.

Consumers have already shown an affinity toward more innovative, digital ways to pay — demonstrating they want more choices than just the old-school plastic card. Of course, knowing how to accept credit cards is about having a customer-centric mindset.

Paying online should be as easy as it is in store for customers, and knowing how to accept credit cards (online or off) shouldn’t cause friction within your own business practices. That’s why, relying on tools and solutions from a company like Payline can simplify how you accept credit cards, both online, in-store, or via mobile. In turn, your customers are more likely to keep coming back.

Deciding how to accept credit cards shouldn’t hold your business back from evolving. Customers want choice in today’s diverse payments ecosystem, and your businesses should be able to give them that — in a fast, seamless and secure manner.

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Anna Kragie is a content contributor for Payline Data. She previously wrote for PYMNTS.com, as a Sr. Content Producer, where she focused on financial services and payments innovation, fraud and security, emerging payments, and FinTech news, research and thought-leadership content across the payments industry.

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