You have a high-intent shopper browsing through the product pages of your store, adding products to their cart, proceeding to the checkout, only to leave your store by abandoning their cart.
Sounds familiar?
You know your store’s cart abandonment rate is high.
Over 68% of the time, customers abandon their carts right before making the purchase, which also causes a dent in your store’s conversion rate. Remember that you cannot improve your cart abandonment rate by concentrating on advertisements or offers. It has more to do with your store’s design.
While there could be many reasons – casual browsing, high shipping costs, lengthy delivery time, and more as to why someone would leave without purchasing, a refined checkout process that’s simple and simplified holds the key to improved conversion rates. The solution lies in offering an optimized one-page checkout experience to customers.
What is a One-page checkout?
One-page checkout is a website design with all the elements of a checkout process on a single page. With the contact details, billing, shipping, and payment details available on a single form, it is a win-win situation for the online store and the customer.
Nobody likes a long-winding checkout process where they have to click through pages to make a purchase. However, if the checkout process is longer, you can be sure that it will negatively impact its sales.
About 88% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in March 2020, and the automotive industry had the highest cart abandonment rate among all studied categories – with a whopping 96%.
Setting Up BigCommerce One-Page Checkout
With BigCommerce’s one-page checkout, it is now easier for customers to fill in their contact information, get the billing and shipping address filled out and also make payments – all in one page. As opposed to multi-page checkout, the one-page checkout process makes the entire shopping hassle-free and straightforward.
1. Optimizations
The optimized one-page checkout BigCommerce is the default setting in BigCommerce, and it works well on both desktops and mobile phones. The shipping country and the shipping method are usually pre-selected. Other convenient features such as detecting the card type when the card number is entered and skipping the billing and shipping for returning customers simplify the process.
- You can set password-less login for your customers. Instead, they can log in using a link sent to their registered email address using a one-time password, making the entire checkout flow simpler.
- When you enable the address auto-complete option, Google prompts your customers with matching addresses – as they begin to type.
- You can also select a default delivery/shipping option – including in-store pickup.
- When you enable the multiple shipping options, you allow your customers to send cart items to various addresses.
- You can also choose to display the coupon field or keep it hidden with a link.
- You can also optimize the error messaging at the checkout. This way, you can either opt for a clear error message detailing why the transaction supposedly failed or go for a ‘vague’ message. While the verbose error message is the standard offering, you can contact the support team if you choose generic error messages at the checkout.
2. Customization Options
BigCommerce allows you to customize their default one-page checkout. You can do this by accessing ‘Checkout’ under the ‘Advanced Settings’ tab. Then, click on the ‘checkout page,’ present under the ‘Customize Checkout’ option to edit the page’s design.
Design
You can style the store design by editing the checkout page colors, font, header image, and more. However, before you start hard-coding the CSS file, it is better to edit the checkout page.
- You can upload an image for the header and edit the background, border, and text color.
- You can change the text color, border color, and background color for the order summary box and the checkout steps icon.
- You can also modify the checkout form fields by adding custom fields to the checkout page. And, the values entered here can be viewed in the ‘View Order’ section. In addition, the custom checkout forms make it possible to collect the account number and customers’ delivery preferences.
Once you are done with customizing the design aspects of your checkout page, save the changes.
Editing the SCSS File
Now, to the hard-coding part – editing the SCSS file – while you can make changes to the content classes, you won’t be able to alter the class names or the nest elements. Each class is accurately mapped to different elements, and changing one name or structure could potentially interfere with future updates.
You can customize the page header, top-level and lower-level elements such as description boxes, edit the content in order summary and order confirmation list, in addition to other customization options.
Configuring Checkout Settings
In addition to customizing the UI and editing the CSS, you also have other optimization options to simplify the checkout process.
- Guest checkout – you can enable this option so that customers don’t have to create an account to purchase on your store – they can checkout as guests.
- Terms and Conditions – if you enable this option, your customers would be required to accept those terms and conditions to make a purchase.
- Order Comments – when enabled, customers can leave comments with their order, like delivery instructions.
- Multiple Shipping Address – this option gives your customers the option of sending items in their cart to several addresses.
- Bot Protection – When enabled, Google’s reCAPTCHA codes will help prevent malicious activities on your store’s checkout page.
- Persistent Cart – This is again an interesting feature addition – useful when people add items to their cart on one device and continue their shopping from other devices. So, essentially the changes made to the cart on one device will be simultaneously reflected on other connected devices as well.
Support & Compatibility
BigCommerce custom one-page checkout works to reduce the cart abandonment rate and bounce rate of web stores, so we recommend enabling these settings to get the most benefit:
- Address auto fill
- Agree to terms and conditions
- The scroll bar on the product overview
- Validation progress
- Focused checkout
If you are not happy with customizing the one-page checkout in BigCommerce, you have the option of reversing the settings just as quickly – and switching back to the default checkout page.
Drawbacks of One-page checkout
We have been talking about the numerous advantages of the one-page checkout, but there could be a couple of ‘potential’ disadvantages.
- Since every detail is made available on a single page, its chance of getting cluttered is relatively high. Unless the site is well-designed, it can result in a poor checkout experience.
- Some customers might want to go back to reconfirm their order details – and a one-page checkout page will make it much more difficult for them.
- Sometimes, having a ton of information on a single page can make the page load slowly. This will impact the overall checkout process time. A slow-loading checkout page doesn’t serve the purpose of having a single page checkout at all.
- If the single checkout page is not optimized and designed properly, it can get lengthy and cumbersome. This might cause some of your customers to lose interest during the checkout process and leave.
Features of One-page checkout
One-page checkout has improved the shopping experience provided by eCommerce stores a great deal. Quick checkout, quicker conversion, improved customer experience, and increased competitive advantage are some of the benefits of a single-page checkout. The following are some of the features of a one-page checkout.
- The entire checkout process is simpler and straightforward.
- The cart abandonment rate and bounce rate are drastically reduced.
- The one-page checkout makes the entire shopping experience enjoyable.
- Keeps the design and navigation simple so that customers don’t have to wade through multiple pages before purchasing products.
- Social media icons, trust seals, and support options make the one-page checkout process user-friendly.
Best Practices for One-page checkout
A single-page checkout doesn’t necessarily mean stuffing the page with all the information, and you should draw a fine line between quick checkout and a single-page checkout. With the latter, you might be stuffing a lot of unnecessary information into one page.
The smart thing to do here is to reduce the number of entries in each section. In addition, it would be best if you skipped or altogether removed redundant fields, such as asking for both telephone and mobile numbers.
Pre-filling customer information or auto-completing known information will also help in speeding up the process. Placeholders will also help your customers understand what to fill in the provided field and come in handy while reviewing information.
Another best practice is allowing your customers to checkout as guests. When you enable this option, you are making the checkout process so much faster and easier that your customers could be tempted to pay a visit to your store again. But, on the other hand, by forcing them to register, your conversion could take a hit.
Conclusion
One-page checkout is one of the solutions eCommerce service providers came up with to tackle cart abandonment. However, there are numerous other techniques and customization features available in the BigCommerce One-page checkout process, which could be implemented based on the specific needs of your web store. That’s why we suggest you get in touch with a reputed BigCommerce Development Services provider who can help you customize your store according to your store’s needs, current cart abandonment rates, and business plans.
About Author:
Name: John Ahya
John is the President and Co-Founder of WebDesk Solution, LLC. Living the digital agency life for over ten years, he explores an extensive eCommerce world. He has immense experience in all major e-commerce platforms. Being a nature lover, he likes to breathe the fresh air on the hill stations during vacations.
