HenStuff.co.uk is an ecommerce website that sells a huge variety of hen party accessories and novelty gifts. The site attracts a colossal number of visitors - especially at this time of year - and desktop users only account for around 50% of this traffic. The others are using smartphones, tablets, and other portable devices to shop for their hen party supplies.
In light of this fact, the HenStuff team decided that it was time to go responsive. They contacted Designer Websites and asked us to come up with a responsive design that would give mobile users a better experience on the HenStuff website. They also requested an updated payment system that would make it easier for their customers to complete online purchases.
Responsive Design
HenStuff's old website was good-looking and reasonably user-friendly, but it had been designed with desktop computers in mind, and didn't cater to mobile users very well. We addressed this by creating a brand new responsive design that adapts to the screen on which it is viewed, meaning that all visitors now get an equally excellent browsing experience, regardless of what kind of device they're using.
The HenStuff brand has been around for quite a few years now, and it was important for the new website to retain the image and personality that the company has established for itself over time. As we reimagined and restructured the HenStuff site, our design team kept a close eye on all branding elements (including logos, site copy, and images used) to ensure that everything remained consistent - after all, we wanted to make sure that HenStuff's customers still recognised their favourite party store!
Improved Payment System
The new HenStuff site uses Sage Pay Version 3, the latest version of Sage Pay's much-lauded payment gateway, to process customer payments. Simple, user-friendly, and exceptionally secure, we feel that Sage Pay is a superb choice for any ecommerce website, and HenStuff have already been reaping the benefits of this improved system (as have their customers!)
Tokenisation is a major feature of Sage Pay's latest version, and we incorporated this functionality into the new HenStuff website to make life easier for loyal shoppers. Customers can now make use of a Fast Pay option, which uses Sage Pay's fast and hyper-secure token system to store customer details, allowing near-instant checkout on future purchases.
This is a particularly great feature for HenStuff, a company that gets a lot of business from repeat customers who organise/attend a lot of hen parties. HenStuff.co.uk is one of the first websites in the hen party industry to utilise a tokenisation option like this, and this - together with the new, mobile-friendly design - will really help to give the company an edge over its competitors.
An ecommerce website is a great way to boost your business's revenue, but before you start making sales online, you'll need to select an online payment system for your site. Eager ecommerce entrepreneurs have many different payment providers to choose from - here are some important things to consider before making your decision:
- Will this payment system make it easy for my customers to pay me?
- Does this payment provider have a good reputation for security and reliability?
- Is this payment system reasonably cheap to use?
- Is the interface for managing payments and refunds easy to use?
Here at Designer Websites, we are extremely well-versed in the selection and implementation of online payment systems. We have built ecommerce platforms for hundreds of businesses, and in this blog post, we will look at three of the most popular payment providers on the web. Do they meet the above criteria? And how will their services suit your business?
Sage Pay
Sage Pay is a well-known payment gateway provider that caters to more than 50,000 customers across Europe. We at Designer Websites recommend Sage Pay to most of our ecommerce clients. Why? Well, let's go back to those three all-important questions...
- Will this payment system make it easy for my customers to pay me? Yes. Sage Pay's user interface could scarcely be more straightforward - it's simply a case of entering your details and clicking 'Proceed'. The system also has tokenisation capabilities that allow users to save their details and skip all that tedious typing next time around.
- Does this payment provider have a good reputation for security and reliability? Sage Pay have a Trustpilot rating of 9.6 out of 10, which should give you a good idea of how trustworthy they are. Furthermore, the Sage system uses a variety of fraud prevention tools and security measures to ensure that payments are completely protected.
- Is this payment system reasonably cheap to use? Sage Pay's ecommerce system is one of the most cost-effective on the market, offering a range of reasonably-priced payment plans to suit businesses of all sizes. In our opinion, their charges are more than reasonable.
- Is the interface for managing payments and refunds easy to use? We believe that the MySagePay console is one of the best features of their payment gateway. It is incredibly intuitive, comprehensive, and simple to use.
World Pay
Many of our clients ask us to integrate Worldpay into their ecommerce websites, so we have a lot of experience with this system as well.
- Will this payment system make it easy for my customers to pay me? Again, yes; Worldpay is relatively good and makes taking payments online easy. However, the Worldpay interface is not as user-friendly as that of Sage Pay.
- Does this payment provider have a good reputation for security and reliability? Worldpay's ecommerce system is very secure, but their Trustpilot rating of just 4.1 out of 10 reveals some serious problems with their service levels, reliability, and customer management.
- Is this payment system reasonably cheap to use? Worldpay isn't the cheapest payment provider, but they are far from the most expensive. It does depend on your payment plan, but this can be quite a cost-effective choice for some online sellers. In some cases, they are cheaper than Sage Pay.
- Is the interface for managing payments and refunds easy to use? Um...no! We think that the interface is very poor (at the time of writing this article), and sadly this lets Worldpay down significantly. They do have some nice features, but the interface is generally very clunky and awkward to use.
PayPal
PayPal needs no introduction - it is probably the best-known payment system on the web. If you've ever bought anything on eBay, there's a good chance you used PayPal to pay for it. But is it the right choice for your business?
- Will this payment system make it easy for my customers to pay me? Yes - if the customer already has a PayPal account, transactions can be completed in a couple of clicks. Even if they haven't registered an account already, it's very simple to sign up, and once they've registered, they'll never have to enter their card details again (unless those details change).
- Does this payment provider have a good reputation for security and reliability? They wouldn't be so popular if they didn't! That being said, PayPal have an extremely poor rating on Trustpilot (just 2.1 out of 10), with many people complaining that the company's customer service is very bad indeed.
- Is this payment system reasonably cheap to use? This is the biggest problem with PayPal: they know how popular they are, and they know that many online shoppers now expect all ecommerce websites to include a PayPal option. For this reason, they are perfectly happy to make you pay through the nose for their services, taking a sizeable percentage of every sale they process (more than 3% in some cases - this can really add up if you're taking a lot of orders via PayPal). In particular, Paypal is very expensive to use if you take a lot of transactions; if you don't, they may be a good choice.
- Is the interface for managing payments and refunds easy to use? Yes - they have clearly spent time designing this for ease of use and it shows. The interface is both very functional and very easy to use.
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