Ecommerce Best Practices: Checkout Process

According to Susan M. McPartlin, U.S. retail and consumer leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Paul M. D’Alessandro, principal at PwC, shopper experience is the first and foremost factor to gain customer loyalty.

Store owners, have you really cared about customer’s shopping experience in your site, in which Checkout Process is a very important factor affecting these “kings” decision?

The questions are one step checkout or 6 steps checkout, registering or checking out as a guest? Which fields should you put into checkout page? How can you make checkout process easier for customers?

My blog post today will give you some tips for these questions and examples from great ecommerce websites.

Happy reading!

1.      One step checkout or many steps check out

Many businesses design their checkout process with 6 steps but others design it with only 1 page.

Apple is a good example of combining between one step and many steps checkout process.  Customers both see which is included in the field they’re filling and also see which fields are remained.

Checkout process in Apple store

Also this is a good example of one step checkout from MageWorld: 

All the checkout information customers can see in 1 page, no scrolling, no next steps, check out process will become easier for your customers.

So for your business, which one will you choose?

2.      Ask less

If customers have decided to choose your products and come to checkout step, you have to catch up them as soon as possible.

“Ask less then customer will buy more” is a slogan that you should remember during designing checkout page.

These are important fields to add to checkout page:

-         (Billing) Address: This part should include zip/postal code, c

ountry, state/province, city and detail addresses.

-         Payment methods: Remember to add as many popular payment methods in your checkout,  in case there is no favorite method for your customers, they will leave you!

-         Shipping methods: Offer customer free shipping. No default shipping method will give your readers flexible choice to get checkout process done quickly.  

3.      Checkout as a guest or register

In many ecommerce sites, they often force customers to register of fill in their account before checkout process. It is really bad practice because sometimes customers can’t remember their own account and hesitate to do stuffs to verify it.

So the tip is you can give them both option: choose to register or checkout as a guest during checkout:

Office Depot provide checkout for both guest and repeated customers 

4.      Make it easier to change your cart

During checkout, customers sometimes want to change their cart. Make this easy for them. Here are some checklists you should make customers easily recognize:

-          What is included in their cart?

-          What is the quantity of each product?

-          How to change the quantity easily

-          Does checkout process have “Continue shopping” link? 

Make sure that customers can do these actions easily in your site. Remember, shopping experience is important, right? So do it and grow your revenue.

5.      Follow up if they abandoned

After all your effort, maybe you can’t avoid your customers leave you or abandoned cart during checkout process, right? So it is best to prepare for it.

-          Prepare an automatic system to send follow up emails to your customers, minutes after their abandoned cart.

-          Integrate coupons into your emails too.

-          Evaluate the program through detail reporting

Above are five tips you can do to bring your customers best shopping experience when checkout. Which have you used with your site? Share with me!