As with any good action plan, it’s important to start with defining the problem. Our goal here is to increase the conversion rate of the checkout page, and the problem is: almost 70% of all shopping carts get abandoned.
Why do potential buyers abandon their carts?
Here are reasons compiled by the Baymard Institute:
Based on this data, we can conclude that to drastically increase your checkout page optimization you want to minimize the user’s points of frictions, especially at critical pages of the checkout.
Below we are presenting you with a number of ideas for reducing that friction and increasing the conversion rate of a checkout page, which you should definitely give a test drive.
CRO Idea #1: Taxes
Let’s fix the most frequent cause of abandons checkout – mention taxes before the final checkout page. More and more e-commerce websites are using this feature to prevent the loss of orders due to the customer’s expectation of an estimated price increase in the form of tax charges or delivery.
CRO Idea #2: Guest Checkout
Since the absence of a guest checkout option is the second most popular reason for abandon checkouts, increase ecommerce conversion of your store by A/B testing a guest checkout feature on your website.
CRO Idea #3: Form fields
According to the Baymard Institute graph, 26% of all users have abandoned orders due to a “too long or a complicated checkout process”. In most cases, reducing the number of fields reduces users friction and increases conversion rate. So always ask your customers as less as possible. Check out our case study on the topic.
CRO Idea #4: Visualizing
Let’s do the checkout process a bit easier for a user understanding – visualize your checkout page. It is ideal if you can place all steps of the checkout on a single page and create a one-page checkout. But if you need to distribute things in multi-page checkout manner, give a user a visual indicator of how far they have come. Conduct CRO tests to find out which combination of text, fields and visuals brings the best ecommerce site conversion rate in your specific case.
CRO Idea #5: Show the purchase
Another tip from the conversion rate optimization services agency – show customers what they are buying. Give them a chance to see their purchase at every step of the checkout, so users know they made a correct choice in terms of colour, size, etc and don’t go back to the cart to double-check anything.
CRO Idea #6: Progress bar
Ready for the last ecommerce checkout page optimization hack? Show your customers how much products they need to add to the cart to receive a gift or free shipping. When you do so and offer free shipping or a gift from a certain sum or a certain amount of products in the cart – visualize it. Such visual future can help you improve conversion rate and increase the average cart size.
Summary
The next step in increasing the conversion of your checkout is to attract customers who have not completed the purchase to your website and urge them to complete what they have begun.
The most effective way is retargeting. We will talk about it in our future posts – stay tuned!
