Picture this: 100 people enter your store and all of them head to the till to check out; only 30 of those customers actually complete their purchase. The rest leave their items at the till with no explanation. Now, you wouldn’t want this to happen in your physical store, so why let it happen on your website?
And to be clear, we didn’t just make those numbers up in our prodigious live one to one shopping minds, according to The Baymard Institute: “average abandonment rate is nearly 70%, eCommerce sites are losing a total of $3 billion a year”.
Consumers want to experience a seamless, fully immersive shopping and checkout process, or you’ll run the risk of losing purchases to your competitors instead. People need support right through to the end of their shopping experience, and perhaps even after, just as they would expect from an in-store experience
Introducing: Confer With Payments, a brand-new feature on our platform that does just that, and more. Your customers can now complete their online purchases in real-time with a retail expert within a single shopping experience. That’s right, not only is it first for one-to-one video shopping, it’s also an incredible step towards reducing abandoned baskets.
We sat down with one of Confer With’s co-founder, Dan Garner, who explained more about Confer With Payments, as well as the importance of integrating it on your platform.
What is Confer With Payments?
Payments is a new functionality we’ve added to the platform that allows a customer, when they’re chatting to an expert, to make a payment for any items they’ve added to their basket in the call. The key thing is that they can complete the entire purchase within the call, and then carry on chatting to the expert. This includes making the payment and getting an order confirmation; they do not need to be transferred to another website or stop the call. Not only can the customer chat to a real person about a product, add it to the basket, and purchase it whilst still on the call with the expert, but it also extends our capabilities to offer a truly seamless, end to end, immersive video shopping experience, which I think is a first in one-to-one video shopping.
What does it do?
Our platform is all about immersive shopping, ensuring that the customers have a guided shopping experience very similar to as if they’re in store. In addition to the products being recommended, demonstrated and added to basket, this is the final point of purchase; they had the order fulfilled and confirmed. The key thing here is that customers can securely make that payment to the retailer using any of the retailer’s payment methods. It creates a familiar shopping experience exactly as they would expect on the website. So, this isn’t something unusual to the customer, they’re going to be familiar with it, they’re going to understand what they’re being asked to do, and they’re going to feel comfortable in that all whilst they’re in the call. This new capability is the final building block in the end-to-end customer journey, allowing the customer to not only build a basket, but to actually purchase the items, have their order confirmed alongside their order number and summary all whilst the call is ongoing.
Why is Confer With Payments so important?
For me, it creates a great online shopping experience. We strive as a business to create the best, truly immersive one to one shopping experience. And you know, we’re trying to create as close a link as possible to an in-store shopping experience. Adding payments into that means you’ve got the final building block. Not only can you create a wonderful, immersive shopping experience, but when the customer comes to payments the expert can also guide them on any questions they may have. The expert sees none of that payment information on the website, but the key thing is that the call carries on. Ultimately, one of the key benefits for the retailer is that it’s a big step in reducing abandoned baskets. So, we know that immersive video shopping reduces abandoned baskets significantly anyway, but there is still a drop off between a call finishing and a purchase being made. However, by allowing the customer to make the payment within the call with the retail expert, this further reduces the chances of abandoned baskets.
A key thing as well is we have now doubled the engagement from the website which allows us to be channel agnostic and prevent channel shift, which would negatively impact the customer experience. Customers can engage from any touchpoint such as email, social channel, website etc and not only have that great immersive experience, but also complete the purchase from that start point. There are no complex payment gateways to be setup or integrations; we seamlessly integrate into their existing payment capabilities and do not add any further complexities or costs to them in doing so. Ultimately, it’s very simple to enable and the benefits are extremely significant.
Confer With Payments
By using Confer With Payments, you can now ensure that those 100 customers will no longer be leaving your store, but instead be completing their full purchases at the till. To find out how you can make the most out of Confer With Payments, book a call with us at a time that works best for you.
