1. Provide guest checkout option
According to esurverypro, 23% of shopping cart abandonment are caused by site requiring registration before purchase. If you have been reading best practice articles, each and every one of them would tell you to eliminate your compulsory registration. Why are people are still doing it? Please, just make things simple and easy for your customers. ASOS remove any mention of creating an account (using New to ASOS? instead) and this has halved their abandonment rate. Impressive, huh?
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| I can only afford to buy one item, please let me checkout as a guest. Thank you, Apple. |
2. Only ask for necessary personal information
Customers feel their privacy is invaded when they have to submit seemingly unnecessary personal information. As suggested by Baymard, either make it optional, or provide a valid reason to ask for this information. For example, I don't want to give out my phone number unless I bought food and they have to call me before delivery or something.
3. Display delivery and payment information
We are talking about absolute transparency here. Make sure you have every single detail explained. Apple has a question and answer session at the bottom of the page, giving people a peace of mind. It can also save time for customer service team - less phone calls and emails.
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| Large, clear, and attention seeking checkout 'keywords' with Q&A session below (apple) |
4. Remove distraction
It is like teaching your kid to learn something - you wouldn't put a toy right next to him, right? Same applies to your e-commerce site. If you take away other navigational elements, advertisement, external links, obvious voucher code box (people are likely to wander off to search for the code, and some may even forget the shopping), customers are more likely to focus purely on completing the purchase. Instead, make shipping and livery information and security logos etc., very prominent. As you can see from above, Apple makes their 'shipping', 'payment', 'account', extremely large and obvious to draw customers' attention to the main task.
5. Provide variety of payment methods
According to WorldPay via eConsultancy, alternative payments account for 22% of global e-commerce transactions. There is no reason limiting the way that customers pay. I have friends abroad who only has Paypal in GBP currency so she couldn't buy from a site which only accept credit card. Allowing people to pay in different ways can certainly expand your market.
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| Every single payment type you can think of. (asos) |
6. Show the progress
People really do have no patience - they want to know when will things be done. Either you can show a progress bar, or make everything into one page like the Apple one, and just expand each session when they are on it. Make sure you let people go back to the previous step if they enter something wrong/ change their mind. Again, it is all about clarity and convenience.
7. Remind them to stay/ come back
Have you ever filled your baskets up and then realise - ah, you can't really afford this. And then you decided to delete your cart? Well, I have. You can consider hitting your customers with a notification (pop-up) when they click delete cart. This may give them second thought. You can also send a reminder style, autoresponder email, a while after they have abandoned their cart. According to a survey, a lot of merchants agree that abandonment autoresponder has excellent ROI.
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| Progress bar on top. Pop-up box appear when you click delete. (boots) |
To conclude, do your own usability test. Be a customer yourself and try to understand how customers navigate through the page. And remember to compare it to other e-commerce site. Is yours simple and straightforward like the others? Have you missed out any information? Is it a pleasant checkout experience?
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