Generally, a great eCommerce website is said to have quality products, budget products, and competitive prices. Does that mean eBay, Amazon, Flipkart are the only best eCommerce websites in the world?
Not necessarily, because having good products and competitive prices doesn’t reflect the greatness in the eCommerce marketplace. Indeed these two alone can bring customer retention but can’t give you actual sales performance.
According to research reports, out of every ten visitors of any eCommerce site, eight leaves without buying the products they added to their cart. So, what affected their purchasing?
It is the checkout process steps which wasn’t great enough to encourage the visitor to complete the checkout process on the eCommerce website. eCommerce website success depends on the sales, not on the people who attract to your site.
You surely invest time and money in the development and designing of the website. However, none of these matters if the visitors don’t make it through checkout processes to complete their purchase.
Why eCommerce Checkout Pages are Important?
According to SaleCycle, “Average cart abandonment in B2C eCommerce website was 77% in 2017, which is now reduced to 74.5% in 2020. That means the users selected the products as needed, added them to the cart, but suddenly changed their minds and abandon the cart and checkout.”
Your checkout pages and checkout process UX are equally important for your website. And most of us don’t focus on the minute details of the online checkout process and checkout page design.
An effective B2C and B2B checkout process of any eCommerce website must be simple, intuitive, robust, secure, and encouraging to the customers so they buy but never abandon their cart.
Hence, it is very much important to turn your online visitors into customers. In this article, we present you with an eCommerce growth hack, i.e., to improve and optimize your checkout process.
Doing so will increase your sales, profits, customer retention rate, and business value. But, firstly, we must know –
What Does The Typical Checkout Process Look Like?
Any eCommerce checkout process has some specific steps, where a consumer comes to the website and completes the purchase. Out of many steps, the final step is the eCommerce checkout process.
An online visitor’s journey starts from awareness to building interest, then making desire about the products, taking the decision to purchase, and finally, making a purchase.
Checkout is the process where the user finalizes choices, confirms with the shipping address, and provides payment.
A failure in the visitor’s journey would decrease your sales. And the competitor would get benefits. Thus, the checkout process in eCommerce holds a special place as a part of the eCommerce marketing strategy.
The typical or say the standard eCommerce checkout process is as follows:
Product Page>>Shopping Cart Page>>Review Items>>Billing & Shipping Info>>Payment Info>>Order Confirmation
If you are able to boost your visitor for completing checkout, then you will make huge differences in your ROI (return on investment). For this, you first need to understand –
Why Customers Abandon The Checkout Process?
Checkout Abandonment is basically a failure in eCommerce sales and marketing terms. It happens when visitors leave the payment process after selecting everything that they want to purchase.
If your checkout abandonment rate is high, then there is some problem in your checkout process. Visitors like this come under the category of lost revenue!
It doesn’t mean that your method of check out is wrong, confusing, and forced the visitor to cancel its purchase in the final stage, i.e., the payment stage.
The truth is, there are tons of reasons behind customers abandoning the checkout.
And some of them are mentioned below:
- Surprise costs and charges
- Lack of available payment methods
- Forced account creation
- Limited shipping options and methods
- Slow delivery and shipping process
- Concerns over security
- Unsatisfactory return policies
- Performance issues and errors
- Complex, burdensome process
- Credit card declination
How To Improve The Checkout Experience?
Now that you know the typical eCommerce checkout process, checkout cart abandoning reasons, you definitely want to have a solution to improve the checkout experience for your eCommerce website business.
Though the main reasons for website visitors leaving payment and cancelling the purchase can be their budget problem, but if you help them with offers, coupons, and sales, then it is easy for the visitor to make a purchase.
But here in our blog post, we are going to tell you about the optimization of the eCommerce checkout process, mainly to eliminate distractions away from the shoppers and putting their focus on buying the items or products as they need.
The checkout process starts from selecting products and continues with a confirmation email. Thus, you need to improve every minute process between product selection and confirmation email.
Methods To Improve eCommerce Checkout Process –
- Make a mobile-friendly eCommerce site and checkout page design
- Include Feature security seals and badges
- Auto-save cart contents when abandoned
- Remove surprise costs and fees
- Reduce alternative navigation at checkout
- Allow guest checkout
- Use discount and promo codes carefully
- Capture the buyer’s email early in the process say while registration
- Be transparent about inventory
- Display trust signals throughout the checkout process
- Use a clean eCommerce checkout page design and remove distractions
- Don’t require shoppers to register before check out
- Enable social sign-in to speed up the registration
- Don’t ask for unnecessary information; Name, number, email id, shipping address,
- payment information is enough
- Send post-payment order confirmation
- Display cart contents plainly
- Keep the back button fully functional
- Give ample product detail
- Help users/guests/visitors in the product selection
- Follow up with a confirmation email
- Don’t give pop-up messages while the user is on the checkout page
- Keep customers on the same domain
- Use progress indicator to guide checkout
- Use data validation and autocomplete
- Provide real-time support (live chat)
- Connect customers to support when they need it
- Use form validation and error notifications
These methods are trusted by every top eCommerce portal development service provider in the USA!
According to the reports from SaleCycle, “the cart abandonment emails are opened more than the regular marketing emails. It means the CTR (click-through-rate) is around 5% higher for cart abandonment emails.”
Therefore, your checkout process needs consistent optimization and improvement time-to-time. If it is overlooked, then chances are that your sales will suffer.
Conclusion
Maybe you are earning good profits from your existing eCommerce cart process, but sooner or later, someone will definitely bring a revolution in the checkout processes.
It is better if you don’t fall back and keep developing ideas to provide the best out of best user experience and keep optimizing the conversion rates for your benefits.
Remember, more sales will pay big returns on investment!
Also, the above methods may look basic to you, but they are really the necessary ones.
Keep investing your mind proactively to deal with cart abandonment. If you have doubts, then comment down it below.
Don’t forget to post your feedback too!
