eCommerce Checkout Best Practices: Make It Safe and Easy for Your Customers
When it comes to your eCommerce website checkout process, two things are important: safety and ease of use. These two factors are important for avoiding checkout abandonment.
The reason people are shopping for your product online in the first place is for convenience. If they wanted to make their lives more difficult, they’d go to a brick and mortar store and look for what they need. Make sure your eCommerce website is optimized for an easy, safe user experience with these eCommerce checkout best practices.
Checkout abandonment is the process where a user might start to make a purchase and then change their mind, leaving the page entirely and impacting your conversion rates (and sales). To minimize checkout abandonment, make sure your eCommerce website checkout process is using these best practices.
The Sign-in Process
Allow social sign-in options to make it easier for your customers to sign in and access their accounts. This establishes trust and security because they can use a verified account from a trusted platform. It also makes the process easier because they won’t need to remember yet another password.
Guest checkout is also an option every eCommerce website should have. Sure, customer accounts are ideal for contact and marketing lists, but not everyone wants to make an account on your website or go through the extra steps to sign in. You could end up losing the sale entirely if you force every customer to make an account, so it’s better to give them the option.
Shipping Charges
The number one reason users abandon their shopping cart at the checkout process is extra costs and fees, especially when they don’t expect those fees. These are charges such as high shipping costs, taxes, extra fees, and anything else that might not get added until the user is about to process their payment.
To optimize your eCommerce website’s checkout process, make sure you are upfront and communicate shipping costs or extra fees throughout the process. Free shipping is a great way to decrease checkout abandonment and increase sales simultaneously, but it’s not always feasible. If you can’t offer free shipping, you need to give your customer an idea of the shipping cost ahead of time to hit with an unexpected surge in their total.
The Checkout Process Itself
The second most common reason online shoppers abandon the checkout process is that the process itself is too long or overly complicated. Don’t over-saturate their process with too many form fields or unnecessary steps. Not only do people not want to spend that much time filling out their information, but they also don’t always feel safe doing so either.
Only collect the information you need for that specific purchase, like addresses and credit card information. You can build a contact list with just names and emails if you’re concerned about that. Simplify the process so people can fill out shipping, billing, and click “complete purchase.”
Payment Options
There are many reasons someone might not want to use their credit card on your eCommerce website. Some first-time users don’t feel safe using their credit card on a website they’ve never purchased from before. Others don’t feel comfortable giving that information out at all. Regardless of their reason, make sure you have various options people can choose from to pay for their purchase.
For example, PayPal is generally a trusted option people are comfortable using because it takes them to a secure checkout through PayPal itself. The company has protections in place for its users. Add a PayPal checkout option to help users feel more secure in their transactions, and you will see more sales from those concerned customers.
Cindy Williams
I’m a blogger in Toronto, working with Web Sharx. I love technology and new stuff on the internet. My other interests are reading and traveling.
