Top 9 Proven Ways to Optimize Your eCommerce Checkout

Top 9 Proven Ways to Optimize Your eCommerce Checkout

“Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and that means that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.” – Steven Pinker

Trade is one of the oldest activities known to man. At one point in human history, someone decided that he wanted more than what he was capable of growing himself, so how do you go about getting something that you are not making yourself? Trade, of course. If I have wheat, I can make bread. But bread is ever so uninteresting if it is not transformed into a sandwich, so how am I going to get meat for the sandwich? You guessed it: trade.

First we had simple exchange. This meant you gave a surplus of what you made, in exchange for a surplus of what someone else made, and you needed (want comes into play a bit later in history). Since people started trading more and more quantities, it became rather bothersome to go to the market carrying 5 chickens to buy a fist of grain, so we gradually worked our way up to the invention of money.

Money feeds commerce these days, and has been doing so for quite some time. Consumerism is rampant, which means people want things. They want products, they want services, they want novelty slippers and merchandise from their favorite band’s website, and they want to get them without leaving the house, or at the very least, they want them while they are at work and not doing anything important.

This brings us to eCommerce, and if you are currently designing an eCommerce website (or at least if you read the article’s title) than you know what we are going to be talking about: the infamous checkout.

You have undoubtedly wasted some time browsing various online stores, looking at things you like and, eventually, want. Once you start wanting it, you press the order button, and that’s pretty much were the trouble begins.

Checkouts can be confusing and time consuming, and more often than not they can make you give up on purchasing the item you wanted. When designing an online store, it is vital you avoid this situation by making the checkout as user friendly as possible, thereby making sure that the customer is encouraged to go through with his purchase.

To help you out, we are going to present to you a list of great ways to make your eCommerce checkout less of a hassle for the user so he will be encouraged to buy anything that catches his eye on your website.

1. Don’t make registration mandatory

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Assuming someone is buying something from your website for the first time, he probably does not have an account on your website. Registering to a website is (or should be) a sign of affiliation to a website, and an acknowledgment of the fact that the user wishes to have deeper customer-provider relationship with the website.

More often than not, he will abandon the purchase if it is necessary for him to register to the website (especially if the registration form and process is a long one), so we would recommend you make registration optional.

2. Fewer steps

Online shopping is supposed to be a faster and easier way of getting the things you want. As such, making the user jump through hoops to order what he wants is a sure-fire way to make him give up on his purchase.

When designing a checkout, you should not think about how you can market more things to the customer, but rather how can you make the experience of buying quicker. If shopping online takes less time, than he’ll surely browse the website more, and find other things he wants to buy. People market to themselves.

3. “Are we there, yet?”

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Regarding what we said in the entry above, we know sometimes the checkout process needs to be a long one. Sometimes it’s actually in the client’s best interest to fill in a lot of forms so he can benefit from warrant for his purchase and customer service, and various other things that you just can not offer without making “jump through hoops”.

When a long checkout process cannot be avoided, it is best you let the customer know how long it is going to take, and maybe even let him know why all these steps are actually in his best interest.

4. Don’t ask the same thing twice

It might seem like an obvious enough tip, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to end up asking the customer to enter the same information twice. For example, if you are asking for a mailing and billing address, if you do not give the customer the option of easily using the same address for both, than you are making him waste time by filling in information that he already feels like he has provided. This can lead to him abandoning the purchase, and that’s money lost just because you didn’t add a little checkbox to your checkout form.

5. No interruptions

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If you’ve ever been interrupted from buying something by a survey, than you know exactly what we are talking about. Again, we are talking about speed here. The customer needs to be able to order something in the shortest time possible. The great advantage face-to-face shopping has over online shopping is that the process of ordering something is as easy as pointing to what you want, and than paying for it.

Now imagine, if you will, that you are in a store, and instead of the clerk handing you your new microwave oven, he handed you a survey about client service. There is now way that survey is going to yield positive results.

6. Encourage checking out

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The sooner the user presses the “Check Out” button, the sooner he buys something. That’s why, design-wise, your websites “Check-Out” button is more important than you might think. Once the customer has added something to his shopping cart, the button should pop up brilliantly, making sure the user sees it and is ready to press it. This makes sure the user doesn’t spend too much time 2nd guessing whether or not he should make the purchase.

7. Let them know about return policies

Remember, you goal here is not tricking the customer into buying things. As superficial as the difference might seem, you goal is encouraging. One efficient and ethical way of encouraging people to buy something is assuring them that they can return what they buy.

This goes hand in hand with our previous entry, so people will be able to make the decision, and not feel cheated afterward. This does mean, however, that you will have to make sure that the things you are selling are not low quality, otherwise you will be loosing money on returns.

8. Hermetically sealed checkout

Now, you can create the perfect checkout form, and it will account for nothing if the user is suddenly sidetracked by one of your own advertisements. This is why you have to let the customer make his own decisions, and not bother him by recommending more things than he has already put in his shopping cart.

In fact, the situation we’ve just mentioned is what you might call a “best case scenario”, because in this situation, he leaves the checkout to look at more products (that still kind of means you have just lost out on a sale). The other scenario is the one in which your advertisements bother him, and he just gives up on buying anything altogether.

9.  “What went wrong?”

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Credit card information is a long, seemingly senseless line of letters and numbers. Because of this, it is really easy to fill it in incorrectly in the checkout box. But it’s not only credit card information that can goofed-up.

Typos are a blight, and they show up at the worst of times. You have to prepare for this, and make sure that, if the user makes a mistake, your checkout will be able to show him exactly what he did wrong, so he won’t have to review the form himself.

To make sure that your checkout process goes smoothly and customers don’t run into frustrating issues, you can do tests with dummy credit card numbers such as this tool from AllFront until you get it running perfectly.

That about raps up our list of checkout optimization tips. We hope they’ll help you in creating great checkout areas so we all can stop window-shopping, and start buying the things we like. Let us know if you’ve found our tips useful in the comment section below.

5 Comments on “Top 9 Proven Ways to Optimize Your eCommerce Checkout

  1. Wow…!
    This is great reading.
    I enjoyed this article very much.
    Thanks for sharing with us great topics.
    Really i appreciate it.

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