Overcome cart abandonment by implementing these five best practices to perfect the e-commerce checkout experience.
Shopping cart abandonment is when shoppers add an item to their online basket and do not complete the purchase. And with an average of 69.99 per cent of carts abandoned at checkout, this is one of the biggest challenges e-commerce store owners face.
The volume of sales you receive is directly linked to the checkout customer experience. An optimised e-commerce cart and checkout are likely to convert more leads, make more sales, and make you more money to help cash flow and profitability.
Luckily, there are many ways to reduce and combat cart abandonment and encourage customers to follow through with the purchase.
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This blog will mention and explain three of the best practices to improve your e-commerce store checkout experience and increase conversions.
Make it convenient
Convenience is the key to customer satisfaction with 87 per cent of millennials saying convenience is important when shopping and 40 per cent of all shoppers ranking convenience as their first or second decision-making factor.
Therefore, your checkout experience should be easy and quick to save customers time and effort to convert leads and reduce cart abandonment.
You can optimise your e-commerce checkout and make it more convenient for consumers by offering multiple payment options and taking a mobile-first approach.
Expanding payment options available at checkout allows customers to choose their preferred payment method. However, setting up multiple payment methods can be expensive, so it is important to prioritise the most popular ones.
In 2024, it is expected that digital and mobile wallets, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Android Pay, will be the most popular payment method closely followed by credit cards and debit cards. Buy now pay later schemes, such as Klarna and PayPal Pay Later, are also becoming increasingly popular with Gen Z and new-to-credit consumers.
Additionally, m-commerce is a growing consumer trend that is driving more and more customers to shop online from their mobile. For this reason, checkout pages must be optimised for mobile users and your storefront should adopt a mobile-friendly layout to ensure you do not lose out on sales.
Keep it simple
Just as it is important to keep the checkout experience convenient, it is just as important to keep it simple. A simple and seamless checkout is appealing to consumers and allows for a frictionless sale.
The flow of your e-commerce checkout has the power to make or break a sale. Asking consumers to provide unnecessary information, sign up for memberships, and to fill in lengthy form fields is time-consuming and off-putting for potential customers.
To simplify the checkout process, you can reduce the number of form fields, enable smart form filling, allow guest checkout, and stick to single-page checkout.
Reducing the number of form fields and enabling smart form filling saves consumers time and energy. To further simplify the process, you can even allow customers to save information for future purchases. This allows for faster purchasing and an increase in conversions.
By allowing customers to checkout as a guest, you remove the time-consuming step of registering before making a purchase. This provides a faster checkout experience for first-time shoppers to reduce friction and lower cart abandonment.
A single page checkout offers a simplified layout and encourages a quick and easy sale. By displaying all checkout information on one page, you significantly reduce the amount of time it takes a potential customer to successfully checkout. A single checkout page saves loading time, reduces navigation time, and improves site performance.
Think on a global scale
Thinking on a global scale helps you target consumers from all around the world to maximise sales and reach a wider audience. By enabling a global checkout, you can sell to many different countries and become accessible to consumers worldwide.
Providing a global checkout experience is paramount to serving global audiences and securing cross-border sales.
To cater to global audiences, you can enable multiple currencies and payment gateways, multiple language options, and provide global tax support.
Multi-currency means that shoppers can pay for purchases using the currency they are comfortable using. Offering multiple currencies and payment gateways at checkout makes transactions simple for consumers to understand. This increases the likelihood that a consumer overseas will complete the purchase.
Likewise, offering multilanguage support ensure that global consumers understand what they are buying and the delivery options for a seamless transaction. This allows customers in countries where English is not their first language to have an enhanced and overall better shopping experience.
Curate subtle opportunities for cross-selling and upselling
As consumers, we’ll often find that when we’re in line to check out in a bricks-and-mortar store, we’re tempted to add a few extra last-minute items to our baskets that are conveniently placed to grab our attention as we wait. Your eCommerce store can mimic this suggestive selling technique and increase the opportunity to cross-sell or upsell your goods or services. Highlight offers on qualifying products, like “buy two, get one free”, or show items that are most frequently bought with the item they’ve chosen.
You can also encourage sign-ups for loyalty schemes by promoting savings opportunities, or highlight any recurring purchase programmes you offer. If you offer free shipping, why not add a visual prompt like a progress meter to encourage additional sales to qualify?
Make good use of your “thank you” page
Often, eCommerce stores will add a simple “thank you” page after a customer purchase as a nicety or acknowledgement of a successful order. However, many eCommerce businesses are missing a key opportunity to build on their customer relationships and encourage future purchasing.
Your “thank you” page is the perfect opportunity to add some additional product recommendations, however this needs to be done subtly, especially if your customer has made a costly purchase. Try to strike the right balance with relevant content suggestions that can enhance or compliment the goods they’ve already purchased.
The “thank you” page is also an ideal opportunity to encourage loyalty club sign ups, or to suggest your customer creates an account to make the experience of any future purchases more seamless. You could also add links to your social media pages, a newsletter sign up or customer service links.
And there you have it, five best practices to perfect e-commerce checkout. At Unicorn Accounting, our expert e-commerce accountants are on hand to discuss your e-commerce accounting needs and to help maximise the growth of your e-commerce store.
To see how we can help, get in touch today.
Related articles:
https://unicornaccounting.co.uk/blog/5-ecommerce-platforms-for-your-business/
https://unicornaccounting.co.uk/blog/5-tips-to-scale-your-ecommerce-business-in-2023/
https://unicornaccounting.co.uk/blog/seo-tips-for-ecommerce-stores/
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