By offering 'check' payment option, am I hurting my sales?

[tomld2]

I offer three payment methods for my ecommerce sites: credit cards, paypal, and mailed in payments (checks, money orders, etc). Probably 50-60% of my total orders are by mailed in payment, however about only 10% of these customers ever actually mail their payment.

So I am wondering if I am actually hurting my sales by offering check/MO payments? Meaning if I didn't offer it, would the majority of these customers bite the bullet and send a credit card payment even if it's not their first choice? I no I would lose a number of sales from customers who won't use their credit cards online, but I am curious how many extra credit card sales I get.

What do you folks think?

If 60% of my orders are via check, but only 10% of that 60% ever mail their payment, would cutting out the mailed in payment option encourage these 60% to send a credit card payment? Even if it cut that number from 60% to 30% I would still be making 20% more sales.

On the other hand, instead of cutting out mailed in payments, we have recently added payment reminders, which auto email the check customers reminding them to pay and also free bonuses for sending their payment within one week.

What do you think?

Tom

[diamondgrl]

Strikes me an extraordinarily high rate of check payment and very low realization of money. Frankly, I would discontinue the option.

The other possibility, though, is that somehow the wording confuses them into thinking that you will ship first and they will pay later. Check out your language.

[upside]

Try disabling the pay by check option and see how it affects sales. Here are two discussions about accepting checks and their impact of sales:

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Conard]

We dropped the check payment option as few would take the time to mail a check.
Stuck up a printable form to mail in payments by check and get about 2 or 3 a month that prefer to send in checks or don't have credit cards.

[SkyDog]

If 50-60% of people are paying by check, something is very wrong. It sounds like there is some kind of hinderance or difficulty that is preventing the user from making a credit card payment. I would look in that direction, rather than errantly thinking this will be solved by simply removing the check payment option.

[tomld2]

It's not an issue of a complicated credit card order form. We don't have an abnormally high cart abandonment rate on our CC page.

I think it's more the fact, that our product is something that is an impulse buy and something people have never heard of. So by submitting a check order, they think they can some how can more information without paying.

Another factor may be like you mentioned our wording doesn't clearly instruct them to mail they're payment first. While we don't say we ship before receiving payment, we don't say otherwise either. This is a wording change we made for our new order page version.

I also think our product dips into the demographic of young adults who don't have a credit card, so they send a check payment with little intention of fulfilling the payment.

We do get hundreds of checks each month, but it's still a very small percentage of the actual check order total.

[brandyace]

Get echecks. It's crazy to expect people to mail in paper checks these days.

[SkyDog]

Most checking account debit cards work just like credit cards, their is really little advantage to taking checks, electronic or otherwise. Especially if your demographic is young and are not from the mail-order-send-in-a-check days. Be careful of electronic checks as suggested, they are very fraud prone from what I understand.