How optimized is your e-commerce checkout page? Have you seen a decrease in your conversions?
Are you aware that, on an average, 65.23% of shoppers abandon their shopping carts?
Perhaps, you get plenty of targets from your marketing campaigns, but are they really converting into sales? Why are shoppers not completing the purchases? What can you do about it?
There are manifold reasons why shoppers abandon their shopping carts. You will find some reasons if you look at the infographic below.
Another major reason why consumers avoid your e-commerce site is due to the fear of being compromised when they hand over their personal information to an unsecured site. It has been assessed that 85% of consumers stay away from unsecured websites.
Luckily, there are measures you can take, such as installing an SSL certificate to gain the trust of the customers as well as speed up the site and rank your site at the top of search engines.
Here are 11 tips to help you design an excellent checkout page that will convert.
1. Simplify the checkout process
Don’t make your consumers change their minds when they have already decided to buy your product by offering a long and complicated checkout process.
For instance, while asking a customer to fill the form, ask only the information that is really needed to complete the purchase. And ensure not to ask any information twice.
A study found out that websites that offer fewer form fields resulted in a higher performance rate during checkout.
2. Build a customized checkout page
Shoppers these days want a personalized shopping experience. 88% of the marketers in the US saw considerable improvements after they implemented personalized marketing.
For this, you need to study the audience and their needs and come up with solutions for the problems encountered so far.
3. Make orders easily modifiable
To err is human, and customers will thank you for making the process of modifying the orders easy. For instance, provide a link to remove a product from the cart if included by mistake instead of forcing them to enter the zero amount.
4. Speed up your website
Did you know that after waiting for 3 seconds, 57% of shoppers will abandon your site? Even worse, 80% of them will never return.
Optimizing your site for speed is thus a necessity to retain customers and increase site visibility. Try implementing measures such as installing an SSL certificate, optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, reducing redirects, and so on.
Look at what Walmart, the American multinational retail corporation must share:
5. Beef up your security
An SSL certificate can help you tighten your security by securing the website. It will help gain the trust of your customers, thus encouraging them to shop with you. In case of multiple subdomains, you can choose wildcard SSL certificate as there are many brands to offer wildcard SSL like Comodo PositiveSSL wildcard certificate, GlobalSign Wildcard SSL, RapidSSL wildcard SSL.
Moreover, search engines like Google are partial to HTTPS sites and will rank you higher on search engines.
Even Chrome marks HTTP sites as unsecured and gives a warning to users; thus, you may lose customers by not installing an SSL certificate that provides encryption to the personal information shared online.
6. Add a checkout progress indicator bar
Progress bars can engage customers. It is essential, not optional, to retain engagement. Shoppers at every stage want to know about their progress. It is confirmed by Dr Brad Myers of the University of Toronto in his paper, “The importance of per cent-done progress indicators for computer-human interfaces.”
Remember to make the progress bar obvious.
People inherently feel good about achieving a goal, and thus seeing their progress will bring satisfaction.
7. Offer a guest checkout option
It has been found that 34% of shoppers have abandoned their shopping cart when they are asked to create a new user account before checking out. So, provide a guest checkout option instead.
You can’t sacrifice your conversions for a few extra memberships.
8. Optimize your mobile checkout experience
Studies reveal that over 50% of e-commerce traffic happens on mobile. So, you are missing out on a lot if you have not optimized your mobile check out experience.
However, also remember that the average rate of mobile shopping cart abandonment is 81%, and that’s a lot.
Check out the common errors in the mobile checkout below and avoid them.
9. Simplify the checkout page interface
The design of the checkout page should be simple and clear while getting its job done. The rule is: ‘The simpler, the better.’
As per statistics, 24% of shoppers abandoned their shopping carts as site navigation was too complex.
A great move would be to remove all the usual site navigation options from the checkout page
10. Offer assistance
Not everyone is an expert when it comes to tech. Though you have tried to make things as simple as possible, users can still get confused.
In such circumstances, instead of offering help pages or FAQ-pages, provide real customer support as Nike does to improve the customer experience.
11. Provide several payment options
If statistics are anything to go by, many shoppers are likely to abandon their shopping carts when they fail to find a payment method.
Moreover, Vouchercloud reports that 59% of potential buyers would leave a transaction in case if they don’t find their preferred payment method.
Offer as many payment options as possible, like the e-commerce platform Comecero does.
On top of that, it is likely to increase user trust as well.
Wrapping Up
It is said that when you optimize checkout, it can recuperate $260 billion in e-commerce sales. So why not follow the 11 tips listed above and start converting your targets into sales?
There are many other tricks you can follow to boost an e-commerce checkout page and increase sales, but the ones listed here are some of the best tips.
Make sure to get an SSL certificate to tighten your security, boost SEO rankings, increase website speed, and gain customer trust. With so many benefits an SSL certificate has to offer, you can’t afford to miss out on it.