Having an excellent e-commerce website, with top-quality products and competitive prices, unfortunately does not mean that sales through that website will be equally excellent. The critical element for any online store, that is, the one that most influences whether your customer will abandon the payment and the purchase, is the payment process experience.
So-called “checkout” pages are all the pages a customer has to go through from the moment they add products to their cart and proceed to payment until the moment they complete the payment. The number, simplicity and presentation of these pages have a decisive impact on the number of purchases completed in your store. An effective payment procedure is one that is simple and intuitive, not one that discourages and annoys the customer and motivates them to abandon the purchase.
How Can You Improve the Shopping Experience in an Online Store?
Offer security and different payment methods
All recent research clearly indicates that the vast majority of customers want to see different payment options and a security seal/logo. Including these two elements can have an extremely large positive impact on the number of sales, because customers instinctively look for them on the payment page. From our own experience and that of our clients, we can easily see that including the options (and logos) of credit and debit cards and systems such as PayPal, Skrill and similar ones covers the largest number of transactions, which means more people can complete a payment.
Although it may sound complicated, it really isn’t too difficult. You can clearly display these logos of different payment methods to convey an overall impression of your online store’s security.
Allow the option to pay without registering
One of the surest ways to annoy a customer is to ask them to register (or log in) before letting them pay. Just imagine that at the end of your shopping in a store you head to the checkout to pay, and the cashier tells you that before she lets you pay for your goods, you have to fill out a form at the checkout! How many of us would leave the cart at the checkout and decide never to visit that store again? Shall we guess? A good payment experience must be quick and simple, without unnecessary extra steps.
There are so many reasons why customers avoid registration that it’s not even worth listing them. But one thing is certain: if registration is mandatory, most customers will not only abandon the purchase but will be so annoyed that they probably won’t come back to your store, and word of a “bad online store” will spread quickly. You really don’t need that. There are many smarter ways to obtain customer data. By all means allow customers to pay without registering; the data you collect during the process, such as the required delivery details (name, address, phone, email…), is already a good basis. If you offered customers during checkout the option to “save the details already entered” at the end, so they have less work next time, most would accept. That way, you get customer data without losing the customers themselves.
Remove everything that distracts the customer
The most effective payment procedure is the one that leads to completion the fastest and doesn’t let the customer focus on anything other than payment. Remove all website elements that are not essential – for example, during the payment procedure you can remove (or simplify) the header and footer of your page, or remove all images and links unrelated to the payment itself. This way, you will focus the customer’s attention solely on completing the purchase.
Short and intuitive forms
Probably nothing kills the conversion rate as much as requiring customers to fill out forms with information that is not necessary for the payment process. Online shoppers expect the process to be fast and hassle-free, so we urge you to make your forms exactly that – short and quick. Otherwise, we fear you can expect a large number of abandoned payments. A form should be minimal and simple, yet include the necessary help messages and a “progress bar” that shows the customer how far they are from completing the purchase.