After you’ve created products for a targeted audience, you market your efforts and attract customers to your online store. Getting visitors to buy something might seem simple. Shopping cart abandonment rates, however, remain high. At almost 70%, according to data collected by the Baymard Institute. According to Barilliance, mobile users display an even higher rate of desertion at 85.65%. These figures are alarming, especially for businesses that pride themselves on quality services and user-friendly interfaces.
Loss of revenue is another obvious issue facing e-commerce shops if users don’t complete purchases. Approximately, USD$18 billion is lost each year, according to Dynamic Yield. To respond, it’s vital to understand why people fail to complete transactions. It’s time to learn how you can optimize your online store to avoid this problem.
Below are a few changes you might want to consider in order to improve your checkout conversion rates and overall user experience:
Simplify your checkout page
An easy-to-navigate checkout page can do wonders for your conversion rates. Especially if you can condense it to one page. If you force shoppers to click through too many fields before their purchase is complete, they’re more likely to abandon ship. This was highlighted by a Baymard Institute study which reveals that 18% of US online shoppers fail to complete a purchase due to the process being too complex or long. Ensuring your checkout page is user-friendly, fast, and simple is crucial to bump your numbers up. Investing in a retail engagement platform that gathers data may be wise. As this will let you track the user’s journey and assess what changes may be needed.
Avoid mandatory account-registration
Website visitors face an increasing level of frustration when online stores force them to register an account before purchasing. As of 2021, Christian Holst writing in Smash on e-commerce optimization and checkout trends revealed that 30% of people abandon their carts for this reason.
Customers may be unwilling to create an account for the following reasons:
Unwillingness to create a whole new account for a small or one-off purchase
Fear of receiving spam or promotional emails
Time-consuming
Unwillingness for the website to store their personal information.
Allowing guest checkouts may be the answer to your cart abandonment issues. If, however, you’re adamant that customers sign-up, but fear driving them away with checkout interruptions, consider an auto-registration that gets sent to their email afterward.
Optimize features for user experience (UX)
Optimizing your website’s features may mean minimizing them. As above, a clean, easily navigable checkout page can attract more customers and achieve higher conversion rates than an overly complicated one. It’s also important to keep your audience’s best interests in mind and alter your website accordingly. In other words, understanding what features deter customers from following through, as well as those that encourage and aid them.
You may also decide to improve your SEO in hopes of increasing traffic and improving overall accountability. SEO and UX often go together, as both share common goals—to provide functional, informative, and targeted procedures to your clientele. Websites that are poorly built and have evident neglect of UX considerations will most likely fail to hold consumer interest.
Other things you might consider adopting to improve your checkouts include:
Progress bars
Purchase time-limits
Visible stock levels
Multiple payment methods
Points and reward systems
Predictive text (address)
Live chat and support services
Clearly stated refund policies, shipping prices, and FAQ pages.
Mobile-friendliness
If you’re an avid online-shopper, you’ve most likely come across all sorts of online store interfaces. You might have even become an expert at figuring out which websites have spent time on mobile user-friendliness and which have not. Mobile-friendly designs can impact your conversion rates. If your mobile version is poor with unusable features, users may be more likely to throw in the towel when the time comes to click on that little “cart” button.
This issue should be at the forefront of business’ e-commerce strategies. Mobile-commerce sales are predicted to make up 53.9% of all e-commerce sales in 2021, according to SimiCart. Mobile spending in the US has also reached USD$47.8 billon, according to Statista. In order to confirm that these numbers grow rather than decrease, online shops should maintain a functional system for phone-use, rather than strictly relying on a desktop site.
Final thoughts
Increasing checkout rates on your online store may seem overwhelming. However, if you understand your customer’s needs, you can focus on your site’s user experience. Then implement appropriate tools to smooth the overall checkout process. Soon your conversion rates may end up spiking rather than diving.
Source: https://www.mikegingerich.com/blog/how-to-increase-checkouts-on-your-online-store/
- https://www.mikegingerich.com/
- Mike Gingerich
- United States
