The PayPal customer experience

Buying and selling over the web is a perilous past time filled with opportunity for disaster with scams and fraudulent hazards await you around every corner. Every request for your credit card details over the web should be met with extreme responses as you bring in the big guns to protect your cash and identification. All this fear and hassle opens the gateway for providers such as PayPal to offer you an alternative and something you can trust. This aligned to sites such as eBay mean that mere mortals can trade over the internet without setting up complex https secure site pages but simply provide their PayPal email account and sit back as punters confidently transfer you money. No Nigerian money scams in the mix or invitations to provide your PIN number just simple secure transactions. PayPal is linked to your bank account of your choice but is not a bank in its own right but allows you to conduct transactions safely online and without any complicated IT wizardry. PayPal. Epic.  

Safer shopping - the customer experience of paying online

The world of e-commerce has moved on at a fierce pace crushing conventional shopping thinking and destroying the high street in its wake. As more customers become increasingly comfortable shopping over the Internet so has the maturity of fraud activity working to exploit this digital channel and the naivety of many of its virgin users. As a result epic experiences demand both convenience and security when providing payment details now that they can no longer rely on the assurance a conventional shop would provide.  There are many rivals to the secure payment arena with tech start ups such as PayPal (www.paypal.com) founded as recently as 2000 competing with traditional banks like Barclays offering new services such as PingIt. The customer requirements are simple, wanting to be able to shop on line as simply as possible while making it as difficult as possible for fraudulent activity to corrupt that experience. From a customer perspective we don't really care how or who manages and owns this payment connection, in fact to the customer this should be invisible and merely a background activity that can be relied upon in the same way as sending an email. For an epic customer experience make it meet the requirements but don't shout about it. Just get it done so we don't have to worry. 

Online payment solutions - my choice

The world of e-commerce has developed rapidly over the past 20 years and fraudulent activity has moved as quickly adapting to this. So when we conduct business over the web we want assurance that this is going to be a secure transaction and that the company will protect your details so we trust them. This doesn't deliver epic customer experience though, this is what we expect as standard. The hygiene factor of security now needs to be supplemented with customer choice. Many of us conduct our web experiences on mobile devices (I am writing this blog from my mobile now) and because of this, payment methods need to be simple enough to do regardless of how fat your thumbs are. So when I complete a purchase on my mobile I want it to be secure but I also want to choose which payment method I use. Certainly I may wish to key in my card details each time and not have any retained data about my payment method but I may also wish to use PayPal or new technologies such as Barclays PingIt. For epic customer experience companies need to offer me all these options and more so that I can select the solution that I am most comfortable with and trust. Give me the choice and make it epic.