Every eCommerce store owner or the person who is in marketing spend countless hour on optimizing sales funnel, eCommerce website, and other stuff. The ecommerce checkout page is a frequently overlooked area for any eCommerce retailers looking to increase the revenue and conversions.
I know a beautifully designed website is great, but a great user experience on site is more important than any other thing when it comes to business. A beautiful website is your first bait to impress your potential customers and convince them to stay, browse, and buy from the site. However, when it comes to buying something online, an online store’s checkout flow should surpass any other element of the website.
You may know that over 60% of buyers online leave shopping carts without completing a purchase, and they won’t come back to complete the checkout if you don’t incentivize them. Moreover, almost every eCommerce brands try to win that potential customer back with discount, but what you should do is focus on making the eCommerce website that trustable and user-friendly so that they won’t leave in the first place.
There are multiple ways to increase trust on your checkout page, and there are numerous ways to reduce abandoned carts at the same time on the cart, product page, and at checkout. Let’s have a look at some of the Checkout Page Optimization Techniques so that you could make that sales proof.
Enable Guest Checkout
Will you really like the experience of on an eCommerce website where you’ve to registration to complete the checkout? You won’t right!! You would like to get an easier experience to initiate the checkout. If you want every new buyer at your store to create an account before purchase from your website, you’re massively hurting your conversion rates. According to a stat,
25% of shoppers abandoned their carts
because they are forced to create an account. If you still want to do that, then you should definitely have a look at this
case study
, where a “Register” button was replaced with “Continue button,” and you would wonder that this simple tweak brought in
$300M in revenue.
As you would not like to sign up for an account before making a purchase, your shoppers won’t really like to do. Everyone wants instant gratification. To make your eCommerce checkout page conversion friendly you should always make account creation optional for your customers.
Capture Email Address Early
Whether you like it or not 100% of your’s users won’t going to convert to buyers who reach the checkout page, so one thing I would suggest you capture the email address as early as possible. So that you can take action lately. The main reason behind capturing email addresses soon is for running
abandoned checkouts
campaign lately. Without an email, you cannot launch your data-driven abandoned carts email series. The study says that with abandoned carts campaign, 15% of abandoners come back and make a purchase who decided not to buy.
I want to give you a small case study on this, and Hyphen Mattress has done this thing very nicely. They have a solid checkout experience, and they have set a great example of how an email validation stage.
Remove any destruction
I am a big fan of removing any disruption from the checkout page. I mean make it as simple as possible, a checkout page’s purpose is to encourage your shoppers to initiate the checkout, not destruct them with many things. I often suggest to minimize header and footer, remove unnecessary links from the header and footer. Instead of those unnecessary links and other stuff you should add delivery information in a lightbox, add trust signals such as secured payment gateway, merchants reviews, etc. so that it will make it trustworthy.
If you want to ask me to give you an excellent checkout page example, then have a look at Couture Candy website’s checkout page. That’s a great example of checkout simplicity. They have not only removed all the destructions, but the brand also pulls the cart summary information down as the shopper progress, but that’s also really awesome.
Cart to Checkout – Make Your Checkout Flow Simple & Quick
If you want to make a conversion driven eCommerce website, then you’ve to make it as quick and straightforward as possible. You should only show a summarized version of what user added to their cart and guide them for the next distinct steps. Remove any unnecessary clutter and make the call to action on the page as clear as possible. Like, if the next step is to choose the shipping option, that should be self-explanatory to the customer. Some kind of progress indicator will be helpful.
Also, you should have a dynamic and quick shopping cart experience on site. Unless your target customers are most patient in the world and easy going people, who will refresh the page to update shipping fees, items count or apply coupon code; they will most likely cancel the order.
According to Kissmetrics
, even one-second delay in loading a page on the shopping cart will cost your eCommerce brand million a year. So you should have a dynamic shopping cart experience on site. Moreover, you can quickly get it done with a developer.
Validate Data
Address validation solutions are a great way to speed up the checkout process and also reduce input errors, and this also reduces loss in revenue in future, this has been relatively used on checkouts in recent few years. PCA Predict has done a great job in creating an easy to integrate, robust solution. Many web browsers, including safari and chrome, also store this kind of data for users on their end.
It’s also helpful for global brands to help their global customers with a platform or service which allows them to recognize the user’s IP address and automatically change currency on the checkout page.
You can also use an address validator platform to auto-complete shopper’s address based on their IP. One of the address validators I like is AddressX, which is easy to integrate with any Shopping cart platform such as
Shopify Plus
, BigCommerce, and Magento.
Display Trust Signal Throughout the Checkout Process
You won’t really feel comfortable to put your credit card data on an unknown website’s checkout page unless you see some social proofs and some trust signals in place. Users start thinking about security when they reach the checkout page, and that’s the most sensitive part of an eCommerce website. Showing trust signals throughout the buyer journey is something very obvious but isn’t implemented on websites.
I recommend showing the following things on checkout.
- Merchants Review or Ratings with stars
- SSL Certificate and mention of secure shopping experience
- Have very clear customer support, terms, and service, privacy policy link in place.
- Logo of available payment options.
- Streamlined Domain. This means your checkout page’s domain address will be as same as your website domain address.
Conclusion
As I explained above, all the critical parts of a conversion driven checkout page, you’ve to keep in mind that your eCommerce checkout page is the most crucial part of your eCommerce store. You cannot win sales and grow your business if you cannot convert most of your visitors. Moreover, this is why it’s so important to make your eCommerce website’s user experience user-friendly and trustworthy. The checkout page is the place where every small error or distraction can have a severe impact on your overall revenue. Get as much feedback as possible from your customers, and have a heatmap software to analyze the heatmap data, which will help you to identify every possible area to reduce friction and optimize your checkout page for maximum sales conversions.
