4 Steps To Improve Your Online Check Out Process
Hi guys,
You know that once customers add one or two items to their cart on your ecommerce website, you already have chance to convert them into real customers. Have you ever wondered what will keep them from completing checkout process? It is a big mistake if you haven’t paid attention to checkout pages.
The fact has shown that most of online customers abandon their cart, and never complete the checkout process. Sometimes it is complicated checkout process, or there is no preferred payment option.
Here are 4 steps you can do to improve your checkout process. Hope you enjoy it!
1. Make Checkout Process Responsive
It is very good that your ecommerce website has responsive design. But how about your checkout process? Is it also responsive, especially for mobile? The stats have shown that mobile commerce is expected to reach more than $86 billion by 2016. And it seems to continue growing. A great proportion of mobile user does not only research products on mobile devices, but they also have tendency to perform transactions right on mobile devices.
Hence, it is such a frustration for mobile user to experience shopping procedure on a non-responsive site.
Let imagine when you want to buy a dress.
Firstly, you visit the website to choose by using your smart phone. Unfortunately, the product image is too small to view. Then you click on the image, you are directed to a product page. However, it irritates you again with small information text. If you want to see image clearly, you need to click on zoom button. You said “Ok, I still like it. I want to place order”. Everything has not stopped, the site force you to fill out many checkout steps, which is very hard to fulfill on a mobile devices. At this step, you lose all patience for the dress.
I believe that most online stores can enormously improve their sales if their checkout process is optimized for mobile.
2. Make it as one step checkout– Less Is More
Now, shoppers have added items to their cart, the thing you should do is to make checkout process easy and fast to encourage them to complete their purchase. Long process may change their mind. At this step, definitely less is more.
All information to fill out on only one page is a good idea. It is very time-saving and encouraging to customers. Don’t ask unnecessary questions, offer any further up-sells, cross-sells or add customers into mailing lists. Respect the demand of customer at this step, which is completing checkout as soon as possible.
For Magento stores, One Step Checkout Pro extension is useful for making checkout process responsive, fast and simple.
3. Offer multiple payment methods
Let‘s customers pay in all kinds of payment ways that they want. The fact is that 24% of online shoppers abandoned cart because of not finding a preferred payment option. Hence, make sure that you offer customers most common payment methods, such as PayPal – a must-have one. Seeing that a website accepts PayPal payments, customers may stay because they value trust, security, and convenience (By using PayPal, it is no need of credit card to complete order). Make it clear for customer to know that PayPal is an available payment option.
MageWorld ‘s checkout process features the “Checkout with PayPal” button at the very beginning of the cart.
4. Checkout As A Guest
The main reason why customers choose shopping online is time – saving. It is a big mistake that you require customer to log in or register an account to complete the checkout process. Customers maybe not interested in creating an account, and insisting them on signing up is really irritating. The single demand is just to purchase. The main reason why they choose shopping online is time – saving.
Look at big brand websites such as Apple, Zara, Nike, etc, they allow customers to check out as guest without creating an account.
I hope that with these above suggestions, you will have ideas for improving checkout process on Magento websites.