eCommerce Checkout Optimization
The checkout is one of the points of highest leverage in your customer journey because of how close the customer is to the transaction. Every point improvement or every problem can have dramatic impacts on your overall conversion rate.
Think of all the time and money you invest in driving traffic, product photography, copywriting, etc. to get someone to buy. Every customer that falls off at the last mile is a tremendous waste of opportunity and effort.
Acts of Simplicity
The job of a checkout is fulfill the most essential point of the purchase: transacting. This isn’t the place to add more information or any levels of complexity. In fact, you really want your checkout to feel just like every other checkout. The more unfamiliar the process is, the less likely the customer is to trust it.
Stick to the basics
People who make it to the cart aren’t always ready to make a purchase. They often narrow decisions, think on their choices; it’s the last step before the purchase is ready to be made.
Story Time: Working at a big box retailer, we saw customers adding 10-15 products to their carts, even when they were purchasing one or two things. They were piling in options as a short list. Wish lists and comparison tools are effective, but often customers will do their own product narrowing in a cart.
It might not seem important, but you need to show some information on the product here as well. A complete name, photo and details of their choices (size, weight, price, etc.). Even though you might not want to have links away from the cart, link products back to their product pages to help with choice. The more difficult you make it to narrow their choice, the more likely they are to abandon their cart.
Use auto-completion and fast checkout
There are simple tools and apps to speed the checkout journey. Particularly for mobile customers, adding every point of personal information is time consuming. Have auto-complete enabled for addresses (which also helps avoid incorrect entries) and use payment tools like Paypal or Apple pay. These tools can cost more for every transaction, but you can measure the conversions that go through these gateways and evaluate if they’re profitable or not.
Story Time: Don’t take it for granted that every payment gateway helps. I’ve had sites that had Paypal account for less than 2% of sales and more than 15% of sales.
Credit and Split-Payment
This can be a devisive topic as some consider online credit and split-payment tools as pushing consumers further into debt. I can see this argument, but I also understand that most people aren’t sitting on thousands of dollars for new appliances when the situation calls, so credit plays a vital role in customer purchasing.
There are many different providers on the market, and they all cost something on transactions, but they can have huge upsides. I’ve seen online credit as high as 28% of purchases. Credit often results in increased purchase value, as customers can afford more than that basic options. I’ve also seen AOV on credit be 40% higher than standard transactions.
Extra: Post-Purchase Survey
You might be surprised, but I’ve seen a lot of success in post-purchase survey completion. You’ve already got the sale, so asking isn’t getting in the way of transactions. Take the opportunity to ask for some honest feedback on the site, the brand, the marketing mix; it might tell you things you never knew.
Agency Tip: The two things I found most valuable to ask were which marketing brought you to the site and what products would you like us to carry. Both of these provided some great additional evidence to help with marketing decisions.
Need Help Prioritizing eComm Projects?
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Key Takeaways
Though many eCommerce checkouts are quite limited in what you can change, it’s definitely worth exploring and optimizing. It should be your mission to reduce as much friction as possible in the purchase path, and losing a customer on the final mile is a big cost to all the marketing and website expense to get them there.
