You’ve worked meticulously over your eCommerce website and made sure every dime is well-spent! From following every textbook rule about starting the online store from scratch, you’ve also learned a lot about your customers’ likes and behavior and then curated your products well. Everything seems going well… until you notice there has been an erratic fall in the purchases and quite absurdly a lot of people have been leaving their cart mid-way. Was there something wrong with the product prices, or worse something wrong with the checkout process?
Customers are known to be antsy while they’re shopping – and rightfully so because they want to complete the purchase asap to resume living. If there’s anything that’s making them wait or start the process over, it’s a huge bummer and can send your customers frustrated. According to reports from Statista, the average cart abandonment rate in 2019 was 69.57%, where seven out of every ten visitors leave their shopping cart midway. There’s a possibility of getting so many more customers into buying your products if they’re pursued correctly. If you’re someone who has learned things the hard way, you might be knowing exactly what we’re talking about here.
Online checkout page optimization is often taken for granted by business owners, but little do they know that it’s the biggest differentiator they need right there. In this article we’re talking about proven, ethical ways in which you can optimize your checkout page for an enriching and seamless purchase experience that converts.
Think of the shopping experience for a customer as a journey – where the checkout process is the finale. It is where your customers make their final decision on pulling the trigger, consider last-minute additions, weigh the shipping options, among other things. A step as crucial as such needs to be entirely smooth, or it turns into a lost opportunity, coming so close to success. While the frontend of your website does matter in getting people to buy more, it all leads up to this moment when they reach the end of the funnel. Here’s how a typical checkout process looks like:
Credits: The Good
Once you get to work around pulling the cart abandonment numbers down by even 4-5%, you may observe substantial changes in the ROI. That’s how relevant it is. When looked at more closely, the reasons for shopping cart abandonment can be anything from high prices to card declines. This is what SaleCycle reported:
Credits: SaleCycle
1. Early Bird Gets the Worm – Get Your Customers To Sign Up Early via Email Address
As wise men say that there are no shortcuts to any place worth going, similarly efforts to lower the chances of cart abandonment starts early on your customers’ journey. It’s a wise move to gather their email address beforehand just in case they decide to leave their shopping cart midway, and you can start the process of reminder emails and other protocols of your shopping cart abandonment campaigns. However, the collecting of email addresses should take place as an independent event, where they can choose to checkout as a guest or as a member. Such options matter in empowering them and thus increase their trust over your brand.
The next step after gaining their email address is to run it through systems like Ometria, which can help in attaching the behavior of a user to their email id, thus helping in sending custom emails. There are also several platforms like Zoho, Litmus that allows you to sync real-time data from your online store and your custom email vendors like MailChimp, Dotmailer.
2. Keep the Checkout Page Free From Distractions
As mentioned earlier, the checkout process can get lengthy and elaborative for your customers to keep up with. The last thing you want them to do is to get distracted or lose interest in completing the purchase. Therefore, aesthetically, you need to rethink the core headers, footers, buttons of the store. It’s also a great move to give your customers an early idea of how the checkout experience would look like. In that way, there are no last-minute alterations required.
3. The Simple, The Better – Cart Page
Provide transparent, uncluttered, easy order summary, and obvious CTAs for your customers to complete the action. It’s always advisable to also have a progress indicator bar set up for the customer to understand which step they are in, and how long till they finish the order. Also, your customers could prefer a custom quantity field for any last-minute additions or removing items. The key to it lies in being customer-centric entirely.
4. Using Trust Signals
As a business owner, you need to analyze the entire experience from the buyers’ perspective. Anything that encourages them or gives them a positive message to complete their purchase is a must-have. Similarly for payment processes, you’d require certification badges, compliant icons, and payment method logos in the footer of your website for keeping them prepared beforehand. Sometimes, customers may also need to use the undo button, in case they’ve added any wrong product to the website. Therefore, you need to keep the back button working throughout the process on your website for removing any friction in between.
5. Autocomplete for Speed and Accuracy
With the help of address validation platforms, the checkout process can be fastened up as it autocompletes details like email addresses, home addresses, and currency according to the data saved on the user’s browser. Customers’ browsers like Chrome and Safari save these credentials on their end, and making sure this works correctly is essential. Built in autocomplete for the address on your end is also helpful.
6. Provide Multiple Payment Options
There are multiple ways in which your customers can be convenient in making the payment – be it Digital Wallets, Credit Cards, or PayPal. There can be underlying affinities or loyalties they can share over some payment fields and can enhance their shopping frequency too. You can also provide exclusive discounts to your customers based on their payment methods, which could also take one step further in trust-building and shopping frequencies.
7. Lastly, Don’t Be Pushy
There’s more harm to being greedy, so there’s no need for pushing your customers to be a member of your store. Now that they’ve completed the purchase, you already have their email address, shipping address – information that really matters. You can now send them all the emailers now and then. For being a member, they still would need to set up a password, and post-purchase isn’t the right time to do so. Instead, once they’ve completed the purchase, follow up with an order confirmation email, and other order updates for better communication.
Remember
Your eCommerce checkout page is important for getting conversion and winning your customers over. Similarly, it can be an ongoing process that needs lots of feedback and testing to make it more convenient, refined, and frictionless.
You may need a developer to make the most of your checkout pages. Here are our recommendations:
Upwork
This is a great place to find the right freelance developers of almost any skillset. Here, you can find Shopify developers to implement the customizations you need to make your checkout just the way you need it.
CodeClouds
This development company offers Shopify Plus checkout customization services, and many others, all with predictable monthly billing. They are a global company, offering lower cost offshore developers but with people in the US to provide support as well.
TMC, a firm based in Ohio, offers a variety of services including Shopify Development. Being a US based company, their costs may be a bit higher, but that means you’ll work with people in your time zone.