The checkout is the final hurdle in the customer journey – and it’s also one of the most critical spaces on your website.
You’ve spent time, effort, and resources working with your customers to get them to this final step, and it’s vital to make sure they have the best possible experience when they’re ready to convert. After all, the difference between them staying and leaving is the difference between making and losing a sale.
Checkout abandonment rates fluctuate widely based on the product and industry, but it tends to average between 60% to 80%. Experts argue that anything higher than 90% abandonment signifies a bad checkout experience, and retailers need to be somewhere in the 20% to 40% range in order to truly provide a good checkout experience.
Here, we’ll explore the checkout process in detail, with tips on how to optimize your checkout to boost revenue, improve customer loyalty, and increase conversion.
Streamlining the checkout process
A streamlined checkout means the checkout experience is as simple and frictionless as possible. Your customers should be able to enter their shipping and payment information quickly and easily, without having to pause, question, or reassess their purchasing decision.
There are many ways you can optimize your checkout to create a streamlined experience:
- Minimal steps: As few pages, or redirects, to work through as possible
- Guest checkout: An option for people who don’t want to log in or create an account.
- Payment options: A variety of payment options, presented in a clear way – Splitit’s white-label solution means that you can offer an installment-payment option without adding any extra logos at the checkout..
- Relevant information: Present what customers need to know about product details, quantity, and other key facts.
- Cost transparency: Clarity about additional costs, such as tax and shipping.
- Trust signals: Assurance that your site is secure and legitimate (more on that below).
- Smooth journey: Fast site speed, no bugs or errors.
- Mitigate errors: Ensure coupon codes are working, products displayed are in stock, and other off-putting errors are kept to a minimum.
Making checkout mobile-friendly
Sure, you don’t need us to tell you how important mobile is in today’s market – but we’re going to do it anyway: as of 2022, there are 6.8 billion smartphone users in the world. That’s more than 80% of the entire global population.
More than half of all web activity occurs on mobile – in 2021, a Statista study stated that 54.8% of global web traffic was mobile. This translates directly to ecommerce – when shopping online, 50.9% of people use their phones to make a purchase at least once a week, according to a 2023 study by DataReportal.
However, a 2019 study found that global conversion on mobile was 1.82%, compared to 3.9% on desktop. That’s exactly why optimizing your checkout for mobile should be a key part of your ecommerce strategy.
It’s an opportunity to provide your customers with the experience they’re looking for, build affinity with your brand, and ultimately improve conversion rate. Some essential ways to optimise the mobile checkout experience include:
- Mobile-responsive design: Ensure that your site looks flawless and is easy to navigate on mobile devices.
- Customizing the journey for mobile: As well as ensuring your site design works for mobile, you should consider the checkout user journey from a mobile perspective – that means simple payment forms, minimal clutter and information, and effortless navigation.
- Mobile-friendly payment options: The payment step should be almost effortless for mobile users – Splitit’s seamless, white-label integration means that your customers can access a BNPL option that is completely embedded in your checkout without adding extra pages or steps.
Building trust and confidence
A frictionless checkout journey is key to boosting revenue, and security is a vital aspect of building customer trust and loyalty.
Just as security becomes more of a priority for online shoppers, retailers should ensure they’re reassuring customers that you’re prioritizing their privacy. It’s not a matter of cluttering up the checkout with information, but rather displaying key aspects, such as:
- Having a clean, modern, and professional design
- Displaying security badges
- Providing accessible information about your return policy, data protection, and customer service contact details
- Being transparent about data sharing and collection – Splitit never engages in data harvesting or sharing, which means your data and your customers’ data doesn’t leave your ecosystem
Upselling and cross-selling
When utilised intelligently, the checkout can provide great opportunities to upsell – but it’s important to get it right, or it could have the opposite effect and cause customers to abandon their carts at the most pivotal moment.
Depending on the industry and product, the checkout can be a useful space to encourage customers to upgrade, check out related products, or level up into a bundle or package. If installment payments are included in your checkout, showing the monthly price for the upgrade is a great way to increase basket size.
When adding upselling or cross-selling into the checkout experience, the same principles apply – ensure there are minimal steps, offer clear and transparent communication about pricing, and make it easy for customers to make a purchasing decision without having to exit the checkout and navigate to another page.
Testing and optimization
In the ecommerce world, things are changing constantly – from technology to customer behaviour and expectations, it’s important to be agile and ready to update and optimize your checkout in order to keep up with the competition.
In truth, retailers won’t ever really get to the end of a good checkout experience – even if you land in that sweet spot of 20% to 40%, it’s all about continuing to monitor and optimize. That means creating a strategy and culture that allows you and your team to:
- Conduct A/B testing to trial, tweak, and adjust different elements
- Regularly analysing user data and behaviour to look for trends, patterns, and areas for improvement
- Engaging with customers and gathering feedback about what worked or didn’t work for them
At the end of the day, a good checkout experience is the difference between a sale and a fail. By looking for ways to simplify and streamline the checkout journey, you’ll create an environment that sets your customers – and you – up for success.
Learn more about how to offer your customers new options with BNPL and get started with Splitit today.