6 Ways To Improve Your Check Out Procedure | Storm Internet

The average rate of shopping cart abandonment is a staggering 67.91% according to the Baymard Institute.

That means that more than 2 out of every 3 customers who add your products or services to your cart, end up leaving the site WITHOUT purchasing.

You can do the math with your own product but if your average sale is $100 and you have 30 visitors to your website add items to cart every month, with ten customers actually buying, you’re losing out on $20,000 a month.

If you can improve your check out procedure, you can begin to capture some of that lost 67.91 %.

Overall it’s important to make the check out procedure as easy and hassle-free as possible for the customer no matter how they are viewing your site. The more pages you make a customer visit the greater the chances are that the customer will abandon their cart.

Now that you see how important it is to optimize your check out procedures, let’s look at:

6 Ways To Improve Your Check Out Procedure

1. Have A Clean User Experience that works on all platforms. The most important part of your check out procedure is making sure that it’s functional across every platform and operating system. 88% of mobile users report having a negative experience when shopping on their Smartphones. Common complaints include, difficult navigation, hard to read print and images, and generally inconvenient and a difficult checkout process that is not optimized for mobile users even if the rest of your site is.
2. Accept As Many Payment Options As Possible. Another way to avoid shopping cart abandonment is to offer as many different payment options as possible. You will definitely want to use a payment processing service so that you can take all varieties of credit cards. You can also use PayPal to process payments and can feature this payment method at the beginning of the process for those users for whom PayPal is the preferred method. Other payment options to consider accepting include Venmo and digital currencies such as Bitcoin.
3. Ask For Less Information. Everyone hates filling out endless forms in order to buy something you want. In fact customers find these forms really annoying and they can lead to shopping cart abandonment. Instead you want to ask only for the information you need to process the payment. If you want to ask for extra information in order to know more about your customers or to send further marketing materials on or offline, be sure to mark the fields as optional so that customers can decide whether they want to fill it out or not.
4. Display Security Credentials. Because of recent leaks of customer payment data at companies like Target and others, customers are understandably nervous about their payment security information. It’s of the utmost importance to make sure that you display the appropriate security credentials throughout the entire checkout process. Beyond displaying your exact credentials, it’s more important to make sure that your customers understand their payment process is secured. For example many customers do not understand what SSL protected means, but they do understand the lock icon and the words 3-level security. The more secure the customer feels their data is, the more confidence they will have in the checkout process and safety of their payment information.
5. Strengthen Calls To Action. In order to make sure the customer finishes the check out process, you must provide clear and precise calls to action beyond the normal fill in your credit card information here. Two easy ways to do this are to use scarcity and social proof. To use scarcity, you can add a timer such as the one Gilt.com uses, which shows how much time the customer, has left to complete the check out process. Another way to use scarcity is to add on time-sensitive “fast-action” bonuses. These bonuses should be available only for a limited time and only if they finish their order on this their first visit. To use social proof you can have a counter on your checkout page displaying how many other visitors are viewing the exact same product or how many are left in stock as Amazon.com does.
6. Don’t Require Log in. The last check out procedure I want to talk about is the idea of requiring login or joining a membership site in order to order your products. Many websites like to require login or signup in order to purchase products because of the information they can gather and the ability to market further products to their customers. However this also results in a lot of shopping cart abandonment as well. It is a much better idea to suggest registration AFTER the customer has already purchased or if your email provider allows it, to opt the customer in with purchase and allow them to opt out as soon as they receive their confirmation email. Requiring login or signup provides another meaning less form for the customer to fill out and allows them more time to abandon their cart.

In today’s article, we looked at the idea of improving your check out procedure.

We started off by looking at the average rate of shopping cart abandonment, which is 67.91%. That means more than 2 out of every 3 shoppers who put an item into their cart, end up leaving the site without purchasing anything. Further problems that bad check out procedures create include buyer’s remorse, and pages that are not optimized for mobile search.

After we looked at the reasons to optimize your check out procedure, we looked at 5 ways you can improve your check out procedure.

They were:

1. Have a clean user experience optimized for all platforms
2. Accept as many payment options as possible.
3. Ask for less information
4. Display as many security credentials as possible.
5. Strengthen calls to action
6. Don’t require login.

Now you’re prepared to optimize your check out process and start making some of that 67.91% of potential sales you’re losing out on.

If you’d like to chat with one of our team about your web development and ecommerce hosting, please call us on 0800 817 4727.