If you have an online business and your main concern is how to improve your checkout process, you’re in good shape. 99% of the hard work—figuring out your products, deciding on pricing, promoting them, designing your website, getting visitors to the site—is finished, and now all you have to do is complete the transaction. Right?
Well, maybe not quite. There could be a number of obstacles on your way to closing the deal, some of which you may not have been aware of even before you designed your website. This is your guide to ensuring that customer carts aren’t abandoned right before checkout.
Optimize Your Checkout Flow
Checkout should follow a clear series of steps. Ideally, this process should flow seamlessly from browsing, to shopping, to entry of personal information and shipping information, to payment, and finally to confirmation. If your store can accomplish all this within two or three clicks, then congratulations, your checkout process is mostly optimized.
Note that it’s MOSTLY optimized, not FULLY optimized. There could be a few factors that, when introduced into your process, could coax a few more purchases out of your customers. The next items on this list will cover some of them.
Adopt a Mobile-First Design
Statistics for online traffic have consistently indicated that about half of all traffic online comes from mobile devices, so if your website isn’t built to be viewed on a mobile device, you could be missing out on up to 50% more revenue. Mobile-first design simply means that your website should be built to look good on a smartphone first. The reason for this is because scaling up from the display of a mobile device is easier to do than scaling down from the display of a laptop or desktop pc.
In the same way, your checkout process should be designed for mobile first. If elements on your checkout pages don’t appear within a smartphone’s display borders, or worse, don’t function properly on a smartphone, it’s time to go back to the drawing board as far as site design is concerned.
Remove Surprise Costs and Fees
No customer will ever appreciate having hidden costs and fees sprung on them at the checkout page, and many will just leave their chosen items behind when these are suddenly added to their bill. Not only will this deter them from completing their current transaction, but it’s unlikely that they’d ever return to shop again.
Prevent this from happening by allowing customers to view their bill in real time, along with any taxes, shipping fees, or anything else they might be charged for when they get to checkout. Shoppers in general, whether online or in real life, should know how much they will be spending on their purchases so they can budget accordingly.
Make Use of Advanced Payment Systems
Online shopping is all about convenience, so anything that interrupts that convenience is a definite no-no for online sellers. This includes limiting the ways shoppers can pay for their purchases.
For a great online shopping experience, sellers need to account for as many payment methods that their customers are likely to use as possible. This will differ from business to business; for example, it wouldn’t make any sense for sellers of digital products to offer a cash-on-delivery option for payment. Take a minute to see what would work for you and your market.
Making use of convenient payment solutions like Maya’s Checkout Plug-ins make transactions even easier. As the leading payment gateway in the Philippines, Maya offers website plug-ins that allow your customers the freedom to pay with credit card, debit card, QR code, or e-wallet directly on your website or mobile app. Whether your site runs on the Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, there’s a Maya Checkout Plug-in that will work for you.
Allow No User Log-ins for Shoppers
Having a user ID functionality on your site is great for tracking your visitors and their preferences. This allows you to customize the way they view your site based on their past interests and interactions with it. However, if you’re limiting sales and purchases only to site guests who are willing to log in, you could be inhibiting your sales potential.
Online shoppers want convenience on their own terms, so sellers must be able to provide that. If potential buyers would rather remain anonymous or purchase items as a guest rather than a tracked user ID, then sellers need to have that option available to maximize potential earnings.
Save Cart Contents and Invite Customers Back
Sometimes, online shoppers simply forget to check their purchases out and accidentally click away from your site without completing their purchases. It’s not that they intentionally leave their items behind; they just forget or make a mistake while browsing.
Give these shoppers a hand by reminding them of their abandoned carts with a quick email notification. Many linked email clients can do this for you automatically so you don’t have to sift through abandoned carts manually.
Giving customers a great shopping experience with an easy checkout process will be the key to making your online business a success. Try some of these tips out on your site and see what works for you!
