eCommerce Checkout Best Practices
Your ecommerce store is up and running, but how do you make sure that your visitors buy your new products? Creating a seamless checkout experience is just as vital as the products you sell and the platform you sell them on, after all, site visitors alone won’t increase your sales.
To ensure your customers go through with their purchases, you need to pay attention to the checkout experience that your store offers. Establishing a good checkout process will keep your customers happy and keep them shopping at your store.
With the growing popularity of online shopping, creating a seamless checkout experience is an effective way for your store to remain competitive and generate revenue.
An optimised checkout process will allow your customers to experience a quicker and more efficient checkout, removing frustrations that could otherwise lose you a sale. This is beneficial for your customers as well as for you as a merchant. Good checkout practices can lead to higher conversion rates, increased trust and reduced cart abandonment, which all in-turn can increase revenue.
So regardless of what you sell on your online store, an optimised checkout process can be a simple way to ensure your site visitors become happy, paying customers.
Here are 10 ecommerce checkout best practices that you could implement for your online store to start increasing your sales.
1. Remove distractions from your checkout pages
Create a streamlined checkout process void of unnecessary clutter that could distract your customer and cause them to exit the checkout process. Only include information on your checkout page that is directly relevant to completing the transaction.
2. Guest checkout
To keep the checkout process as efficient as possible, provide the option of a guest checkout for new customers. Alternatively, offer sign-in options via social media accounts.
3. Progress indicators
Give customers an idea of where they are in the checkout process and how much more they need to do. Guiding your customers in this way can make completing the checkout process easier.
4. Multiple payment options
Offering different payment methods can help increase your credibility as a retailer, while also allowing your customer to checkout with their preferred payment method. While most customers will prefer to use common credit or debit cards from Visa or Mastercard, consider including payment options such as American Express, PayPal or eWallets.
5. Avoid surprising your customers with unexpected fees
Be transparent with your customers from the beginning of the checkout process. Adding unexpectedly high shipping costs or fees towards the end of checkout can deter customers from purchasing, and increase cart abandonment.
6. Provide trust seals
Many online shoppers want to be reassured that their private payment information is being handled in a secure manner. Displaying trust seals throughout the process can help customers feel more comfortable making purchases.
7. Optimise for mobile checkout
Mobile cart abandonment is higher than desktop cart abandonment. Creating a seamless mobile checkout experience can help your business to tackle this while allowing you to take advantage of the rise of smartphone online shopping. Additionally, ensuring your website is optimised for mobile can help you to reach a wider customer base. Google’s new ‘mobile-first’ indexing means that websites that are optimised for mobile will rank higher in search engine results.
8. Clear call to action buttons
Provide clear navigation buttons such as “proceed to checkout” to direct your customers towards completing a purchase from product pages or once they have added an item to their basket.
9. Auto-fill or address search
Streamline the process of entering in addresses by offering postcode search or autofill options. Additionally, copy billing information into the shipping information form, and give the option to change the shipping address should it differ for the customer.
10. Automatically save cart contents
If a customer leaves products in their cart, auto-save the items to allow them to easily resume their purchase when they next visit your website. Additionally, if you have an email address or mobile number available, send reminders to customers about items they have left in their basket.
In addition, include an email or SMS trigger (if you have the information) that sends them an email reminding them of items in their cart.
Providing a good checkout experience for customers is a key aspect of ecommerce that is often overlooked. Using our ten best practices for online checkout could help your business to remain competitive in the growing online marketplace.
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