Today’s e-commerce businesses spend a great deal of their resources attracting visitors to their websites and encouraging those visitors to add products to their shopping carts. Unfortunately, cart abandonment rates are surprisingly high.
Shopping cart abandonment has a direct impact on your conversion rate and your bottom line. In addition to following other ecommerce success tips, you need to look at how customers manage to complete their purchases on your site.
Developing and executing a clear marketing strategy to improve the checkout process can have a profound impact on the customer experience and help increase your company’s online sales.
What does “checkout” mean? Definition of the “payment process” in French
The checkout represents the different steps that the Internet user will encounter when he arrives in the shopping cart to proceed to the payment. It includes several phases:
Shopping cart with the different items
Creation of the customer account (if necessary)
Choice of the delivery
Choice of payment method
Confirmation of the order (email marketing)
To boost your sales, you must therefore optimize the check-out process as much as possible!
The checkout process ends when the customer reviews the order and all the details of the sale before finalizing the transaction.
Why is checkout optimization important?
With shopping cart abandonment being a significant and costly problem, you don’t want to give your customers any reason to give up on their selections. When they are frustrated, annoyed, distrustful or lost, they are more likely to abandon their cart.
Order optimization takes into account consumer expectations and targets the most common and important causes of cart abandonment. That’s why optimization can improve your e-commerce conversion rate and your business’ bottom line.
6 best tips for your check-out process
While checkout may seem simple, there are many aspects you can focus on to make the finalization more seamless.
Every step before checkout needs your full attention so that you can optimize the whole process and provide the best possible e-commerce customer experience to your future loyal customer.
- Offer a one-page checkout process
Today’s consumers are often in a hurry when they go online to shop, and even more so when they check out. In addition to checking the responsiveness and performance of your site, don’t forget to evaluate the time and number of steps required to complete a purchase.
While many e-commerce sites offer a multi-page checkout process, the preferred method will be a one-page checkout tunnel. This page will include fields to be filled in with the buyer’s personal data, mailing address, payment information and shipping preferences.
When the user submits these details, the next page should allow for a final review before completing the sale. Consider adding a progress bar at the top of the page so the customer can see what level of the transaction they are at.
With WiziShop, your e-commerce automatically includes the Smart Check-Out feature: in one single page, your payment tunnel is optimized for a faster purchase!
- Stock and delivery times: transparency first
In many cases, learning that an item is out of stock or awaiting delivery during checkout is more than an inconvenience. For example, if the item is purchased as a gift, the buyer needs the item to arrive by a specific date.
Internet users can always go back and choose another item. However, this major inconvenience may be enough to send the customer to another website.
To avoid this, make sure that stock status and delivery times are clearly indicated on the shopping cart pages. Choose an e-commerce solution that will be able to update this data in real time.
- Optimize the UX of your site for mobile browsing
Statista estimates that more than 70% of online shopping will be done via mobile devices in 2021. The shopping cart must be optimized with mobile users in mind, as they are becoming more and more numerous in France and around the world.
This means that all data must be easily viewable on a smartphone or tablet screen. Few consumers finalize a transaction on a computer once it has started on a mobile device: your interface must be fluid and flawless for optimal performance.
With WiziShop, your Mobile UX is optimized by default and you can choose the AMP format for even better performance!
- Use quick and easy web forms
Forms should have simple fields and should only ask for information that is essential for the sale. The checkout page is not the place to ask for the customer’s date of birth but the address, phone number, email address and bank details.
The idea is to complete the sale and checkout as quickly as possible and in as few steps as possible. While the average checkout form has 14 fields, you should aim for a maximum of 7 fields to be filled in in order to divide the “work” load of the consumer who wants to go shopping quickly. Also, only ask for the user’s data once!
Online shoppers should always understand what data should be entered in each field. For example, a field for the customer’s first name may say “First Name” in the text box, but that label may disappear when the visitor starts typing their info. A better strategy is to place a label above or below each field rather than inside the field.
- Highlight security and reassurance badges
Consumers need to be sure of the platform on which they are about to add their banking details in particular.
On the merchant’s side, the more security and reassurance the website displays about safe browsing and a strict privacy policy, the more you will maximize your chances of conversions.
Get trust symbols from reputable sources like McAfee, Norton and others. These symbols should be displayed in the footer of your entire website and more prominently on the checkout pages.
- Display the exclusive advantages of your online store
There are many reasons why consumers abandon their shopping carts, so give them some clear reasons to stay and especially to turn their backs on your competitors.
For example, you can highlight the savings they get from current promotions.
You can also clearly display the fact that your online store offers fast and free shipping. Users like to be supported, so make sure that your customer service number or chat support is also clearly visible on all your pages.
