Hi there, and welcome to our “Give me 5 Series!” where we share five useful eCommerce tips that will help improve your strategies and pave your way to success.
In our newest episode, Gabriela Florea, CRO Manager at 2Checkout (now Verifone), shared five best practices that will help you optimize your checkout flow, boost your conversion rates, and ultimately drive more sales.
The checkout page is one of the strongest pillars of conversion when it comes to selling online. It is the place where the customer makes their final decision whether to make a purchase or not. Having a smooth and seamless checkout flow is one of the most important factors to consider when building your eCommerce business strategy.
Here are five actionable tips to optimize your cart flow:
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1. Have a checkout localization strategy
If you are looking to expand your eCommerce business internationally, a strong localization strategy is a must!
This means offering your customers the opportunity to pay with the payment method and the billing currency of their choice, as well as optimizing your checkout page to support multiple languages.
At checkout, be sure to localize:
- The payment methods shown so that they include local preferences.
- The currency and language.
- The pricing – where possible opt for in-country pricing, by converting it to the local currency yourself, without having to depend on auto-conversions which usually rely on Foreign Exchange rates.
- And the last one, make sure you localize the number of checkout steps – shoppers in some countries prefer a short, one-page checkout, while others in some other countries might prefer a more complex one, which usually includes a review page.
2. Avoid long forms
Try offering a condensed version of the checkout form. If the buying process is not a quick and effortless one, users might get impatient and give up the purchase altogether. Reduce your form fields to the absolute minimum required and avoid asking unnecessary information. An effective way to figure out which form will convert better is to A/B test multiple options and find out what information your shopper is actually willing to share with you.
Other tricks here:
- Enabling auto-formatting the card number with spaces in the form field dedicated to the credit card number.
- Use an Express checkout option, which often pulls delivery details from the shopper’s digital wallets.
- Include a checkmark to match the delivery detailed address with the billing address, so that the user has less to input.
3. Use incentives
An effective way to reduce cart abandonment is to add incentives to your checkout page. These can either be voucher codes, discounts, free shipping offers, freebies, upgrades to a certain PRO product, or even a longer subscription period.
You can also provide your buyers with a loyalty and rewards program where they receive a certain number of points if they complete their purchase. And once they collect enough points, they can use them to purchase another product of their choice. This is a good way to also turn your buyers into loyal customers and have them return to your eCommerce store.
4. Enable guest checkout options
In these fast times, people expect to get things done quickly and in an effortless manner. Offering customers the possibility to complete their purchase without the hassle of creating an account beforehand is a must.
Sometimes customers do not want to create an account before they place an order. In some other cases, they might have just forgotten the passwords of their accounts. These are situations that create unnecessary steps in the checkout process which might end up with your shoppers abandoning their carts.
To avoid this, give your customers the option to place an order without creating an account on the spot, but offer the possibility to create one after they have made their purchase, as most probably they will do so because they’re interested in tracking the order they placed.
5. Use omnichannel solutions
Nowadays, customers have multiple shopping channels to choose from.
To offer your buyers a seamless checkout experience, it’s very important to implement a strong omnichannel strategy. For example, when your customer adds items to the shopping cart while they are browsing your website from a desktop or a PC, the same products should be found on their mobile devices if they decide to finalize their purchase from them. Using an omnichannel strategy will ensure that all your data is stored in one place and that your customers enjoy a fluid buying process.
Don’t forget to optimize your website for mobile devices. This means that your eCommerce site needs to have a responsive design, so that its content looks the same regardless of the device that your shopper is using – whether it’s a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer.
Now that you have discovered these five useful strategies that will help you optimize your checkout flow, your next step is to A/B test them and see which one works best for you.
Thank you so much for watching! If you have any questions and suggestions, feel free to share them in the comments section below. See you next time with more useful eCommerce tips!
Are you in search of the best payment provider for your eCommerce business? Check out our previous “Give me 5!” episode here to discover the five essential features you should consider when choosing an online payment provider for your business!
