Magento

Seasoned e-commerce merchants already know that it is not only important to offer buyers a diversified range of payment options in their online store, but the checkout pipeline leading to payment is just as important. A checkout pipeline that is full-featured, responsive, customer friendly, easy-to-use and one especially custom-tailored to lead to an equally intuitive payment method is a necessary step towards higher sales conversion rate. It is also important selecting the right and credible payment options to offer in your store. Aligning your brand with other major eCommerce brands helps build brand loyalty and credibility while simplifying checkout for a large portion of your customers.
With that in mind, consider these:

Checkout by Amazon
Amazon is one of the biggest and most popular online marketplace today. With so many shoppers buying goods through Amazon, the company has built up quite a loyal following. Incorporating Checkout by Amazon into your shopping cart allows shoppers to choose a payment process they’re familiar with—and one that often has payment information pre-populated to make the checkout process as simple as the click of a button. Among Amazon’s other resources for small shops, Checkout by Amazon offers the ability to pay for goods through your Amazon account, a process that customers are familiar with. Whatever your usual checkout process entails, Checkout by Amazon speeds it up by giving your customers the ability to pay with saved credit card information, instead of having to fill out a new form. Now with 2nd Generation Checkout By Amazon fully incorporated into Inline IXCBA™, store owners can now fully customize the front-end payment interface that enables customers to complete payment within your checkout pages.

Here is how to integrate Checkout By Amazon in your magento store: IXCBA.

Embedded PayPal
Needless to explain, PayPal is a great way to enable customers pay for your products without sharing financial information. It’s one of the world’s most trusted names in online payments, representing one of the easiest ways to gain customer loyalty through aligning yourself with a trusted brand. Some 43 percent of North American online shoppers have used PayPal. Now with the advent of IXEPP™, customers can now complete PayPal payments in-situ; that is standard or express PayPal payments can now be completed without being directed to pay pal’s website.

Here is how you can integrate PayPal using IXEPP.

Google Checkout
As one of the biggest brand names in the world of online media, Google’s seemingly endless range of web services has attracted customers from all around the world. Google Checkout is simple to use, secure and widely utilized—and as an added bonus for the business, every dollar spent on Google search advertising gives you $10 worth of free sales processing.

Brian G.
Mageix

Converting Inquiry into sales is one of the toughest parts of online business. I want to know whether Payment methods matters in converting inquiry into sales?

Because I had heard that due to lack of payment methods visitors are bouncing from the site though they have reached the final step for payment. Is this right? If it is right then how it is possible to give all payment methods in an online store? I am bit confused so please give me some suggestion. Thanks in advance.

Hello Brynnae,

Thank you for your inquiry about this topic and I apologize for not responding sooner. It\’s been hectic here at Mageix lately.

Anyway, the diversity of the available payment methods unquestionably affect the sales conversion rate for an ecommerce store as much as it does for a physical store. Imagine what happens when you do not offer say PayPal and a customer who does not have ( or does not want to use) credit card but has (or would rather use) PayPal balance to make the purchase. This results in a lost sale. Nowadays, customers are savvy about credit card security when it comes making online purchases especially on small (or not so popular) businesses/websites. Most customers would rather not expose themselves financially by entering their credit card information on some unknown (not so popular if you prefer) website. They would rather make that purchase through a known established brand such as PayPal, Amazon Payments or Google Payments knowing that these 3rd party companies have established security features to protect them from potential risk of fraudsters and identity thieves. Not only the issue of security affects customers decision as to which method of payment should they use, there is also an issue of convenience. For example, Amazon offers a very convenient, quick and easy-to-use (customers do not need to enter any shipping or payments information, but can simply use those already stored in their amazon account) checkout process for all its registered customers shoppping on any 3rd party website that is integrated with their Amazon Payments System through Checkout By Amazon or Simple Pay.
So, it is essential to offer as many payment methods (at least the popular one) as you can on your website so as to lessen, if not eliminate, all occurrences whereby customers are forced not to buy from your website because they cannot use your current available payment methods. 

As to the second part of your question, it is almost impossible (also not necessary) to offer \"all\" available payments methods. But, offering as many as you can especially the popular ones is absolutely possible. In my opinion, any ecommerce store today should accept credit cards (directly on their website through a merchant account), PayPal, Checkout By Amazon, and Google Checkout. Depending of what sort of products being sold, it also might be helpful to offer some sort of offline payment method such as Cheque/Money Order. Some merchants even offer credit-based payment methods such store credit line, Bill Me Later, Lay-A-Away and more.

In conclusion, there is no objection as to whether or not the availability of flexible payments methods affect sales conversion. The more different payment methods you offer decreases the chances of abandoned carts.

I hope I adequately answered some of your concerns.

Thank you

eLayaway™ is also a good e commerce solution software. You can also consider it for your online store.
eLayaway™ is a patent-pending alternative transaction option that allows suppliers to procedure, provide and improve their online and stone & mortar layaway programs. By giving practical transaction plans that are instantly selected from the customer’s banking account, suppliers enjoy the benefits of providing layaway without the management and logistical complications previously associated with the popular transaction procedure.

Hello,

Two extensions related to this thread.

1 - Paypal Adaptive Payments

2 - Magento Layaway Payments