It has never been easier to do business and sell your products online, thanks to technology, and with so many payment solutions at your disposal, it should not be a problem to find a way to accept payments from customers in the most streamlined and user-friendly way possible.
Here are some pointers on what you can do to ensure that the checkout experience is a positive one for all of your customers.
1. Minimizing Abandonment
It is a fact of life that a percentage of shoppers will abandon their purchases at the checkout and that can be very frustrating if your abandonment rate is too high.
When you consider that some estimates suggest only a third of transactions are actually completed at the checkout stage it is clear that you need to find ways of improving the customer’s experience so that they don’t change their mind and click away from your site.
One surefire way to deter shoppers is to make the checkout process too lengthy and complicated. Try checking out yourself to see how challenging it is and work on simplifying the form filling so that you make changes to improve things where needed.
2. Automate Where Possible
Most of us have a positive aversion to form filling which is why it makes sense to try and take advantage of tools such as Google autofill and lookup tables that make it easier for customers to input their address and billing details as quickly and easily as possible.
Shortcut tip: You can now use an algorithm to identify the credit card type rather than prompting customers to fill in what type of card they are using, making it quicker to pay.
3. Accept a Degree of Anonymity
Not everyone wants to subscribe to your newsletter or create an account with you, which is where guest checkout comes into play.
Offering a guest checkout option should help to reduce your abandonment rate.
4. Take a Tip from the Big Boys
It doesn’t hurt to take inspiration from some online retailing giants, as they clearly know how to improve the customer checkout experience and one of their tricks is to hide the navigation bar from the checkout page.
You could argue that removing the navigation bar at checkout reduces the complexity of the payment process as the page appears less cluttered.
From a cynical perspective, you could also observe that making it harder to click away might improve your conversion rate.
5. Provide Some Extra Reassurance
It takes time to build trust when it comes to online shopping relationships but one way of reassuring your customers would be to look at adding trust badges that send the message to shoppers that their details are safe and secure.
Advertise how seriously you take the matter of preserving the integrity and security of shopper’s data and it should help give customers an extra layer of confidence that they can trust you with their personal details.
If you take some of these suggestions on board and continually look at ways of improving the customer experience on your website it should make a noticeable difference to checkout conversion rates.
