What is Ecommerce Checkout Page?
The Checkout Page is an essential page on the ecommerce website, allowing the customers to make the order by providing their information and completing the payment. The designs of the checkout page are different among sites, which finally decides the effectiveness of their checkout process.
In this blog post, we would like to give you 10 valuable advice for designing a perfect checkout page for your ecommerce store. Most of our clients’ websites applied these tips and improved their conversion rates significantly. Let’s figure out now!
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1. Move from Multi-page Checkout to One Page Checkout
Coming back to a few years ago, most of the ecommerce websites applied the Multi-page checkout, which divides the checkout process into several steps. In order to complete this type of checkout, the customers will have to provide information for each step and then click on the “Next” or “Back” button to switch to the adjacent checkout pages. Actually, this traditional checkout type would bring more benefits to the store than for the shoppers. On the one hand, the merchants can easily collect the customers’ information even when the checkout is not completed. For instance, in case that the buyer has already entered their email and shipping address but cancel the checkout in the following step for some reasons, the store still has the submitted information to follow up that customer. On the other hand, this type of checkout takes a lot of time for the users to fill out and edit the information. They’ll have to wait for the checkout page to reload multiple times and have a tendency to leave the site before completing the checkout process.
All things considered, we highly recommend you to replace the Multi-page checkout with the One-page checkout. So, what is the ecommerce One-page checkout? In short, the One-page checkout includes all steps in the checkout process on a single page with the aim of completing the sale faster, without any page reload. More specifically, the customers will fill/ edit the required information fields (e.g.: name, billing and shipping address), choose the payment method, and apply coupon codes,… all in one checkout page. By this way, they will know exactly what they need to do to complete the purchase and be more willing to do it.
2. Apply Address Autocomplete Function
As you may know, in the Billing/ Shipping Address of the checkout, there are a lot of required fields (e.g.: City, State/ Province, Subdistrict, Zip/ Postal code), which makes many customers feel uncomfortable and time-consuming to enter. Therefore, it’s highly recommended to develop the autocomplete feature in your checkout process. Here is how it works: When the buyers type in one of the address fields, the system will automatically suggest some related addresses for them to choose. Once a specific address is selected, all of the remaining fields also are filled at the same time. As a result, it takes just a few seconds to complete the address section in the checkout. Apart from this, if your website is developed on a popular e-commerce platform (e.g.: Magento), you can easily integrate this function on your site by installing a quality Address Autocomplete extension.
3. Make your Ecommerce Checkout Page “Irreducible”
In simple words, you need to simplify your checkout page as much as possible, removing all unnecessary elements.
The first thing is to ask only the essential information (without this information the transaction can’t be processed) on the checkout form. In case that you still want to add less important fields to the checkout page for other marketing purposes, remember to classify all the fields to “Required” and “Optional” and add fewer than 2 optional ones.
A checkout page should include only following fields:
- Billing/ Shipping Information: Name, email address, shipping address, phone
- Payment & Shipping methods
- Discount: coupons, gift card
- Order summary: product image, product attributes, shipping fee, and the total amount
4. Allow Easy Guest Checkout
One of the most common reasons that lead to cart abandonment on the ecommerce checkout page is the mandatory account registration. For a lot of customers, signing up for an account during the checkout process is unpleasant and time-consuming, which can drive them away. Especially for whom don’t visit a store very often, it’s unlikely that they are willing to create a new account for their one-time purchase. Therefore, in order to satisfy these shoppers, it’s necessary to add the guest checkout function to your site. In simple words, the guest checkout provides the shoppers with an ability to make a purchase without logging in to an account. Although there are some disadvantages of the guest checkout option such as impossible order tracking, product reordering, difficult return and exchange management, it offers a convenient way for the users to place orders rapidly.
5. Create a Mobile-friendly Checkout
Undoubtedly, there has been a sharp rise in the number of people using the mobile phone for shopping online in recent years. Owing to that, your whole ecommerce website, especially the checkout page, needs to be responsive on both desktop and mobile devices. Apart from the responsiveness, you should also consider other factors such as text, image, and button size to optimize the display on mobile. Remember that more than a half of your customers are using their smartphone for checkout on your site.
6. Offer Various Popular Payment Methods
The more payment gateways provided, the more chances that your customers will complete their checkout process. Here are Top 5 popular payment gateways that you should consider applying into your ecommerce store. Besides direct online payment methods, a great number of online stores also provide Cash on delivery (COD), which allows the customers to pay later when receiving the goods.
7. Gain Customers’ Trust
Most of the shoppers now are more serious and careful when making any transaction online. Hence, if your store fails to convince them that it’s absolutely risk-free to provide personal information and conduct the payment on the site, they will leave for sure. Fortunately, there are a variety of solutions to make your site trustworthy in the eyes of the buyers. For example, you can show logos of payment options, your SSL certificate, security logos, trust badges, testimonials, social proof, contact details, and so on.
8. Apply Free/ Reasonable Shipping Fee
We’re not sure if you know that high shipping fee is one of the major cart abandonment reasons. Sometimes, the buyers found that the shipping charge is equal or even greater than the cost of their selected products and cancel the checkout. In other rare cases, although the store asks for cheap shipping fee, the shoppers are still unhappy since they have already had to pay a great amount of money for the goods. There are several ways to handle these situations. First, it’s advisable to show the customers the amount of shipping fee as soon as possible, even before they go to the checkout page. Second, if possible you should provide free shipping on all orders or on just great value orders. For example, all orders that are $150 and over will get free shipping. Finally, if you cannot cover the shipping fee and have to charge the purchasers, remember to offer a reasonable amount that your buyers are likely to accept.
9. Make sure that Coupons Work
Issuing coupon is an effective way for the ecommerce store to boost sales in the short time. Assumed that the customers want to buy your stuff because of very attractive discount but they fail to apply it on the ecommerce checkout page. Can you guess whether they still want to get that item or not? Here is our advice: First, create and test to make sure that your coupons work smoothly on the checkout page. Second, give the customers a specific instruction for applying the coupon code – in your promotional banners or directly on the checkout page. For you, it might be just a piece of cake to use the coupon, for others it might not. Third, make the coupon code field outstanding and easy to find in the checkout process.
10. Provide Live Chat for Instant Support
Actually, not many ecommerce stores know such great benefits of the live chat function to the checkout process. For example, when a purchaser failed to apply the coupon code, they can get instant help by chatting with the staff via live chat. Then, the store can help to solve the issue by defining whether there is a problem with the code or the customer hasn’t entered the code correctly. As a result, with the timely assistance, the customers can continue their checkout process. In this case, if the store isn’t equipped by the live chat feature, there is a high possibility that the buyers will give up on the checkout.
11. Allow the Users to Save their Carts
The final suggestion to enhance your ecommerce checkout page is adding the “Save the Cart” function. In many cases that the customers have to postpone the checkout (because of lacking money on the card for example) but are still very interested in the selected products. Therefore, it would be ideal if you allow them to save some items in the cart or the entire cart for later purchases.
As you can see, there are an array of factors that create a good ecommerce checkout page, from the type of checkout, which fields are included, available payment methods, live chat function, shipping fee, website reliability, to coupon application and cart saving possibility. A convenient checkout process plays an important role in improving cart abandonment rates and enhancing your profits as a result. If you have more useful tips and want to share with us about the ecommerce checkout page, be free to leave a comment below.
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