Online retailers face challenging issues to improve their customers’ experience from getting them online to their ecommerce website in the first places to finally checking out and paying for their purchase.
Based on the feedback from my last upmarket blog post, I thought it may make sense to discuss ways to improve the checkout experience and conversion for your online shopping cart.
Many websites require that users sign up and register before they purchase their order. Research shows that over 20% of these users will abandon the idea and go elsewhere. The alternative here is to make available a ‘Guest’ checkout facility and simply collect collect the standard information such as billing details and email, and then process the order. Once they have completed the transaction then you can either send them an email or on the last confirmation page, ask them to supply more details to register an account. A good percentage of people will do this.
Such as not disclosing shipping costs until the final page before credit card or paypal submission. Many clients complain of shopping cart checkout page abandonment and hidden costs can form a major part of this. Be upfront about them, or have a dedicated page to explain the costs. Be transparent! Research also shows that if there is a ‘Shipping’ page on your website, people expect to find the costs of shipping there. Be clear, professional, friendly and honest from home page to product arrival.
Theory says that by showing your main navigation and other call to action links on the shopping cart page, users can be distracted from following through their checkout process. Be mindful of asking them too much else at this stage. At the same time, it’s not advised to have no links on the page and have only the ‘checkout’ button forcing them to click the back link. Keep your navigation, but reduce the links and keep it relevant to the process at hand. Customers don’t like feeling trapped.
Website users, like everyday consumers, will window shop first. They look at your website, see what products you sell, add them to the shopping cart and finally they will make a decision. A good percentage of these users will leave your website to compare other sites for similar products. Finally after a bit of research, and if your offer is competitive, users will generally come back. If you have built in the ability to store cookies to remember what was in the cart, you save them the time from doing it all over again and greatly improve the experience and conversion chance.
People don’t want to wait for a long time for a checkout form to load up or to be waiting too long after clicking the ‘submit’ button. This experience can raise concern about if and how much their credit card has been charged for. Sometimes the user will hit refresh thinking it’s a problem at their end especially if the site has no message to show that the transaction is in process. Ensure best practices are put in place to gain customer confidence. We all know credit card approval takes a few moments, so simply re-assure them that this is what is happening.
I have seen websites where mandatory fields are not recorded properly, or where I have missed (or incorrectly filled) several fields, I get a JavaScript popup for each field – making it hard to remember which fields they were. Best practice is to have ‘live validation’ and this is done when a user moves from one form field to the next. The aim is to have a highlighted text next to the field explaining what needs to be corrected. This ensures that by the time they hit the ‘Submit’ button, there are no errors.
On the checkout page, offer a support phone number, support email, support FAQ’s and anything else you feel is required to give that sense of security. Customers feel secure that if anything was to go wrong, there is always a number to call. Remember, not everyone is still 100% comfortable spending online.
Many shopping cart systems these days allow for the site admin to setup auto-responder emails. They re-enforce support and that an actual transaction has taken place. Plus it is an easy way to send out a receipt immediately following a purchase.
Ultimately, the close your website shopping experience is to that of a (model) physical retail environment, the quicker you will earn the rap-ore and word of mouth required to improve your site visitors and shopping cart conversion.
If you would like Alive Creative to help improve the results of your current Ecommerce website, or if you would like an Ecommerce website designed and develop, please contact us by filling out this eCommerce Enquiry Form, or feel free to call or SMS me direct on 0400 502 299.
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Great article. What is the best way to measure how many checkout abandonments you get? Is it through Google Analytics?
Yes, Google Analytics or any other Stats package you may have setup will give you an indication of these figures.
Simply have a look at how many people land on the url associated with your checkout page, and compare that to the number of paid orders you have received. (usually you can look for the url for the “Thanks for shopping with us” page or the “your order has been successfully processed”.
As we learn a little more about the power of Google Analytics we can move to set of conversion funnels and goals which will give us the ideal travel path through the website and immediately give us a snap shot of the number of site visitors we lose at key pages through the online shopping experience.
Hi I haven’t updated my website since my first range. I need to find someone to help me. Can you reccommend anyone?
Hi Chantal,
I would be more than happy to advise and guide you in the right direction. You can email me directly at ben@alivecreative.net.au and we can go from there.
Cheers.