You work hard to make sure visitors can find your products and your website online, and even harder to funnel them towards the checkout with well-designed product pages, enticing product photography and customer reviews. But your onsite optimization shouldn’t end there.
Recent checkout abandonment figures suggest that, even once you have succeeded in getting a customer to the checkout stage, there is still plenty of opportunity for them drop out before completing their purchase and there are some factors that have a much bigger influence on cart abandonment than others.
Regardless of your industry, the following adjustments can be made to streamline your checkout process for consumers and will help to reduce abandonments in the final stage of the purchase journey.
Offer a guest checkout option
The biggest deterrent to order completion is the inclusion of a mandatory sign-up form. In fact a survey from Tolunda found that over 25% of UK consumers would be put off from making a purchase if they were forced to register. Most customers are looking for a quick and hassle-free way to add payment details and shipment information, and setting up an account will automatically lengthen the process – or at least, a customer will consider it to be a much more time-consuming process.
In reality there isn’t a great deal of difference between the details that are required for a guest checkout and those that are required for a full account set up. By offering a guest checkout you are still able to capture a valuable email address for marketing purposes but you won’t scare your customers off by making them commit to a full account.
The best guest checkouts will still give the customer the option to convert their guest account to a full account once they have made their purchase, simply by setting up a password and utilising the information the customer has already submitted. In this way you can effectively prevent registration from being a barrier to checkout and make it an added extra at the end of the customer journey instead.
Shorten the process
The longer it takes for a customer to complete the checkout process, the more opportunity there is to drop out, so retailers should invest in improved functionality that will reduce the most time-consuming stages of the checkout. Address finders can make a considerable difference to completion times and make it much easier for customers to input their shipping and payment details. Smaller improvements like providing the option to mark your billing address the same as your shipping address rather than typing the same details in again can be very easy to implement and will save the customer from having to enter duplicate information.
Make the process transparent
If your checkout takes place on multiple pages it can be extremely helpful to display each stage of the process and highlight where in the checkout cycle the customer currently is. Designing each phase of the checkout on a separate page will also make the process seem less intimidating and more manageable.
By breaking the information down into stages like ‘shipment’, ‘payment’ and ‘confirmation’ the customer can clearly see the progress they are making, what is expected of them at each stage and will save them from the sense of ‘information overload’ that can sometimes be experienced when faced with one long checkout page filled with multiple text fields that all require information.
If you ask for extra information, explain why you require it
If you are requesting information that is not strictly necessary for the checkout process such as gender or date of birth you should provide visibility as to what this will be used for i.e. to help tailor a customer’s online experience or so they can receive unique discounts.
Asking for these additional personal details is great for your CRM but can ring alarm bells for customers unless it is made clear why you need this information and what you will be doing with it. Be sure to weigh up the pros and cons before gathering this data; it could lead to greater marketing insight but may reduce the amount of completed transactions as a result. If you can do without, just ask for what is necessary to complete the purchase.
Checkout optimization is all about increasing speed and convenience and you should aim to make it as quick and easy as possible for visitors to buy from you. In most cases this can be achieved by adding improved functionality, but you can also reduce abandonment rates simply by reassessing what it is you are asking customers to do at each stage.
