For any eCommerce store, offering an excellent user experience is at the center of everything. This is important as only enhanced user experience will help your business with better customer retention and customer acquisition, thus leading to increased ROI.
The majority of the businesses understand the importance of increased cart abandonment rates and focus majorly on it; however, it is equally important to focus on the process that leads to it. A good number of eCommerce stores out there have witnessed cart abandonment while shoppers were moving through the checkout process. So, optimizing the checkout process by keeping user experience in mind is crucial to avoid such situations.
There are a few amazing tips that you can follow to enhance the user experience of your eCommerce store. They are:
Have a simple interface for the checkout
When it comes to delivering an unmatched user experience to your customers, how can you not invest in a good checkout page! Just like the rest of the pages on your online store, the checkout page is equally important as it is where your customers make the purchase. So having many browser controls here will not work in your favour, rather will distract the customers from the actual task. You need to keep the checkout page simple and clutter-free and it should not have any unnecessary elements that may take away customers, attention.
However, it is important that you provide a “return to shopping” button or link to let the customers shop again if they wish to go back and buy something more. Moreover, ensure all the buttons leading to the next step is prominent enough to be followed by customers.
Allow guest checkout
There are many online shoppers who are not interested to create an account just to shop at an eCommerce store. This means you will be able to boost the conversion rates at your store by 10-30% simply by removing the compulsory account creation process to guest checkout. This way shoppers won’t be compelled to create an account to place an order. Now, this can be equally beneficial to the customers who have forgotten their username or password as well as for the store trying to deliver an amazing user experience.
If you are shopping at Walmart, you will see that it allows buyers to browse products, add them to the cart and finally reach checkout without having to register at the store in the first place. Here shoppers can easily complete the checkout process as a guest.
Don’t turn signups as barriers
When customers come to your shop let them shop rather than forcing them to fill forms first. It would be better that you keep registration to the checkout and not before that. You don’t want to do anything that will stop visitors from adding items to the basket in the first place. Many avoid these as they feel that it takes effort and time to fill them up. Moreover, it is not good from the user experience perspective too.
You increase the chances of your visitors turning into customers by moving such barriers even further down the line. This is because your visitors got a chance to go through the products and even select the ones they like to buy before reaching the form and so chances are less that they will stop now. However, if you place such barriers at the beginning of your sales process, chances are high that they may walk away.
If you look at the same example mentioned above, you will see that Walmart only asks for signup/login when the customer reaches the cart to checkout.
Have a single-page checkout
Lately, single-page checkouts have become quite a popular feature among eCommerce businesses as well as shoppers. Apart from delivering unmatched user experience, their role is huge in enhancing conversion rates. As per a report of Baymard, a long and complicated checkout process leads to around a 21% increase in cart abandonment rate. Single-page checkouts are easy to implement while it gives full control to the store over many things.
Offer single-click sign-ins
For digital presence, IDs and passwords have turned out to be critical. However, people are not comfortable remembering different credentials for different logins. Now you can manage to offer an enhanced user experience at your store by offering one-click sign-ins. Here you can provide the facility to use social accounts like Facebook and Google to make it easy for the shoppers to get into your marketplace. Apart from easing the registration process for the customers, this functionality will give your business some pre-vetted information about the users.
At Best Buy, they let the customers sign in to their store by using their Google or Apple credentials.
Add “Save for later” feature
Some users believe that the cart information will be saved when they return back and will be frustrated to know that everything is gone. They will be too irritated to fill up the cart again and buy from you. Such a poor user experience will lead to a lower conversion rate for your store. Your store will be able to reduce cart abandonment numbers due to such incidents by adding in the feature of “Save for later”. This will let the shoppers choose products and save them to be bought later. With this feature, the shoppers can easily visit the cart whenever they want and continue shopping from where they left last time. This means saving all efforts and time spent browsing and selecting products!
Let’s here take the example of Amazon where you will see that when you will visit the cart after adding in items, you will be offered an option to Save for later. This way you can buy the item spontaneously next time you visit the store without having to go through the pain of browsing and choosing.
Display a progress indicator
The checkout process usually involves multiple steps. This means the customer will have to keep moving a few steps before completing the order. So, when you add in a progress indicator to this process, your customer will be able to know the exact step they are at right now and how many more to go.
Your customers will have a better understanding of their position in the checkout process by looking at the progress indicator. This gives them better control over the steps while working from the user experience perspective. They will know the steps that they covered and the ones they will need to cover and this will remove any kind of confusion that they have.
Optimize it for mobile
Today the use of smartphones to access the internet and browse websites is on a rise. With more millennials and the following generation using mobile phones for everything, it is justifying for a business to smoothen the whole user journey of their eCommerce store for mobile devices.
This means eCommerce stores will be able to deliver a better user experience by optimizing their checkout process in a way that simplifies the shopping experience for mobile users.
Allow ease of order modification
Chances are there that people can have a change of shopping plans or even may have added in wrong goods to the cart. So, it is up to you to simplify the checkout process by working towards improving the user experience.
You should start by offering ease of modification and thus save your potential customers from frustration. In case the customer wishes to remove an item from the cart just offer a remove link which they can simply click and delete the product without any hassle.
Remove distractions – keep the customers sticking to the checkout process
It is important for the eCommerce business to establish an uninterrupted checkout process to boost conversions. Apart from helping businesses with increased conversions, this works as a great step towards enhanced user experience. Moreover, having distractions in the process can confuse the customers and they may even leave without completing the process. Some of such distractions can be unwanted graphics, product recommendations, advertisements, etc.
Spark emotions
The majority of the time customers want to buy a product by completing the checkout process. However, there are a few tips to speed up the process and turn it into a reality. You can create a sense of urgency and induct the fear of missing out by displaying the remaining number of product units. This can work as a good step towards building customer loyalty, thereby enhancing the shopping experience. You can also display here the benefits of buying the product immediately and thus increase your chances of more sales.
If you go through the Target store, especially through the daily deals, you will see the items are mentioned with remaining stock and a limited period of deal availability. Just see here the example of Roku Smart TV.
Direct “Buy Now” option with products
Designing a simple and smooth checkout process should be the main agenda for any eCommerce business. There are customers who visit the site with the aim focused on buying a single product and move out through checkout quickly. To help such customers, provide the “Buy Now” option directly on the product page along with the “Go To Cart” option. This will save a lot of time for the buyers and will thus let the store offer a better user experience.
For example, when you visit product pages at Walmart, you will see a “Buy Now” button along with the “Add to Cart” option. Just check out the example of the Samsung Galaxy Tab here.
For an eCommerce store improving the checkout process based on user experience is crucial. If your business is finding it hard to get the job done, the Mage Monkeys team can handle the job for you. Right from identifying the pain points in your checkout process to implementing the right strategies, our team of experts will help you enhance the user experience of your eCommerce store, thus boosting conversions.
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