A positive sales experience is crucial to keeping customers. The cart abandonment rate for ecommerce retailers is 69.82%! 1 That means that just three in 10 shoppers who add items to their cart will actually complete their purchase.
One of the most significant areas of pain for customers is the checkout. Learn how to optimize your checkout to ensure happy customers and maximum revenue.
Tips for checkout optimization:
Display Security Badges – Online shoppers are concerned about their privacy. With so many fraudulent sites and areas for security breaches, customers are leery when placing orders on sites they are not familiar with. Security badges reinforce why they should trust you to handle their transaction.
Some badge types you should display:
- SSL certificates
- Payment badges
- Antivirus software logos
- Money-back guarantees
Offer Guest Checkout – Ecommerce retailers require a lot of information from first-time customers. While saving that information in an online account can make future purchases faster, forcing shoppers to do so causes 34% to abandon their cart. There is also the issue of using the data obtained for marketing campaigns. Some customers simply do not want to be part of your list. Consider offering guest or social checkout to allow shoppers to complete their purchase without entering additional unnecessary details, such as their birthdate or a password.
One Page Checkout – The fewer steps there are in the checkout means less chance of frustrated customers. Streamline the number of steps required to make a purchase. Make it fast and convenient. If you do continue with multi-step checkout, consider showing a progress bar so customers know exactly how far they have to go to complete their purchase.
Use Google Auto Fill Address – Google auto complete will not only make it faster for customers to enter their shipping information, but it will also help reduce manual entry errors. You can enable this on your online store to automatically populate a customer’s town, state and zip code based on the first line of their address. This option should be included at both the shipping and billing steps.
Mobile Responsive – It’s no secret that the majority of today’s online shoppers are doing so from mobile devices. In order to capture some of the estimated $621 billion dollars that will be spent while shopping from mobile devices2, it is essential to have a mobile friendly checkout. How to optimize your checkout for mobile:
- Minify code to deliver fast speeds
- Have a responsive design that resizes based on different screens.
- Use larger, finger-friendly buttons for things such as “Add to Cart” and “Checkout”.
Offer multiple payment methods – In addition to the traditional credit and debit card payments, offer shopping apps and digital wallets such as PayPal and Google Pay. Many purchasers have a preferred method of payment. If you don’t offer it, you could lose the sale.
Cross sell – Increasing the amount of the sale can also be included in optimizing your checkout. Recommend items that compliment what your shopper already has in their cart. Offer a coupon for an increased dollar amount of the sale or for a future purchase.
While checkout optimization can take time and effort, small decreases in cart abandonment can add up to significant total revenue increases. The tips listed here are “best practices”, but consider A/B testing to identify what optimization techniques work best for your business. Or, place test orders yourself while asking yourself, “Is this easy?”
- https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate
- https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/mobile-commerce-future-trends
