For a website that deals with e-commerce, the checkout process is one of the most important steps that demands significant time and efforts. Its salience can be inferred from the study which reported that seven out of ten visitors choose to leave the site without actually shopping. A checkout process that demands too much customer efforts would only discourage them from proceeding further. The success of an ecommerce website development strategy lies in maximizing conversion rates and in minimizing the abandonment that happens at this point.
The blog intends to present tips, tricks and tactics to minimize the number of steps in the process, and to simplify it to the customer. This may serve as your complete checklist before web design and launch, and a playbook to building problem-free eCommerce Checkout process.
Minimize the information that you seek from the customer
Amidst the hustle-bustles of today’s life, customers tend to abandon websites that require too much effort and consume too much time. Once the customer has moved on to checkout, your aim should be to motivate them to complete the shopping process. Do not ask them to log in or fill in registration forms that require too many details to conclude the shopping.
Build trust and credibility throughout
Make sure that you integrate the further processes in checkout with your website instead of moving the process to a third-party e-commerce website. Moving the customer from one site to the other leads to loss in trust and credibility. Also include logos of credit cards and other factors that add credibility to your website. Cloudi5 Technologies is a leading web design company, with experience of designing and developing websites for a wide spectrum of industrial applications. As we build a website, we make sure that the trust factor in carried over in almost all the pages, by curating and positioning the features carefully.
Maintain transparency and do not throw surprise costs
It’s better to be transparent about the information on delivery time, availability of the item and the additional costs and taxes. Include a shipping cost calculator in the previous pages, or in the review page, apart from displaying the flat rate that is inclusive of all additional costs. This would improve the transparency and credibility in the minds of the customer.
Facilitate quick error fixing
The best web design benefits are hugely immense. Because the aim of the checkout process in an ecommerce website is to equip customer’s complete purchase seamlessly, it is important to help them sort out errors, if they may occur in the process. Ensure that along with the error notification, you include details and ways of fixing them, so as to motivate them to complete the checkout process. This otherwise is tedious, cumbersome and annoy the user.
Provide offers, incentives and other customized deals
Offering customized deals, rewards, coupons, cash backs, and other promotions at the check out are proven to increase the conversion rates. Such offers and rewards motivate customers to go ahead with checkout and to complete the shopping process.
Keep a track of data and other essential metrics
An incomplete order or a form at the checkout is a powerful sign that the customer is interested in the purchase of your product. There are chances that the purchasing experience of the customer was interrupted by a problems and irregularities in network, computer or in the website, that is temporary. This wouldn’t have diminished the shopping interest of the customer, and so it is important to collect and keep a track of their data. With the data that is gleaned, the sales team can make follow-on and help the user with a seamless shopping user. This could also be useful in understanding data about the attribute that actually hampered the user from concluding the shopping. By doing so, can fix the technical glitches or any other challenges that deserve immediate attention.