33 Lunch: Oops – are you making it too hard for customers to pay you?

Sometimes it’s hard for even the most enthusiastic customer to actually make a purchase!

I recently filled some forms in to put my daughter down for day-care I noticed it said there would be a small charge to go on the waiting list. It didn’t say how to make this payment so I emailed the day-care to find out. They emailed back with four words ‘Credit card is fine” but no details as to who to call or how to actually process those credit card details. Hmm.

But at least they took a credit card. Last year, shortly after the baby was born we received an invoice from the paediatrician. I would have happily paid it promptly but the only method of payment was to send a cheque. A cheque! I wasn’t even sure that we still had a cheque book. I called them up to see if they would take EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer). The answer was no but they did suggest that I could (and I kid you not) go down the street and get a Money order from Australia Post. Eh?

And then I had to step down from my high horse.

The other day someone emailed me to ask if they could buy How to Bake a Business from my website using Paypal. Oops. How did we miss that?

So, because none of us are immune to oversights and  mistakes, I thought today’s recipe should be about checking out whether we are easy to pay!

What it is

A quick check of whether we are easy to pay.

Why it works

We don’t buy from ourselves so we rarely realise that we are making it difficult for customers to pay us!

What you do

Quite simply, you run through the buying process that a customer goes through when she buys from you.

This might start with the invoice so dig yours out and take a look at it. Does it say how to pay? I know this sounds painfully obvious but I have a few invoices (mainly from small healthcare providers, so if that’s you, take note) that are completely devoid of payment info.

Assuming you do include payment info, are you giving people useful payment options?
Credit card payments are expensive for small businesses but if it’s your clients’ preferred method of payment, what you lose on the charges you will almost certainly gain on making sales and getting paid quickly!

If you don’t send invoices until after a customer has paid (like the daycare example), walk through your process and check that it’s clear to customers how to pay.

Finally, just because some customers seem to have a problem working out how to pay and using the payment methods you offer, don’t assume they all do. Because, of course, we don’t get to see the would-be customers that walk away.

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