How to make your checkout page more user-friendly?
You must have done a shopping in the departmental store someday. What would you do if you find the checkout line too long or very slow? I am sure that you would not drop your items on the floor and leave the Establishment. Most of the times, you would wait for your turn to come. However, the case is not same with online shopping. If you find a website’s checkout lengthy or very slow, you would abandon the site and look for another website that is quicker. Getting shoppers to your website is not an easy part, but somehow we manage to bring them on the site anyhow. However, the next part to keep them engaged on the site is the toughest. You have to entertain them, till the payment is done. The checkout process is the most important part in this whole engagement game. Most of the online shoppers drop the items and leave your site from this point itself. Inefficient checkout process is the reason for shopping cart abandonment on majority of eCommerce sites. This happens for a variety of reasons. It might even be possible that visitor would just abandon the site for no reason. However, there are certain ways that can be used to optimize the checkout process on eCommerce sites reducing the chances for shopping cart abandonment. Customers should be able to review items in their shopping cartThough this feature is effectively handled by the view cart button on your product pages, but you cannot rely on them alone when it comes to the checkout process. The checkout process is generally isolated from the regular website navigation. There are sites which restrict the site navigation on the checkout pages. So, it would not be possible for the customers to review the items in their cart during the checkout
process. Adding a separate view cart option at the checkout page is a good idea in this case. It will allow the visitors to see their cart without leaving the checkout process. Thus, removing a possible exit from the checkout page. For example; this Magento checkout extension shows an Ajax based shopping cart at the checkout page itself. Here, the shoppers can easily review their shopping cart without clicking on anything.
Make the cart update seamlessWhen we shop online, we are mostly confused. In that confusion sometimes we put some items in the cart or for any reason we might want to remove products, increase the quantity, or decrease quantity of an item in the cart. The checkout process, in this case, would fail to engage the customer if there is not option to update the cart at the checkout process itself. So, it is very important that the cart used in the previous point is also capable of handling updates very easily. Otherwise, it might just give the customer another reason to leave the checkout flow. For example, the Magento checkout extension in the previous point allows the customer to remove a product or update quantity of the products. The price of the cart is updated according to the modifications done in the cart. Show-off your site’s security– Online shoppers are very much concerned about the safety of their online transaction and personal information. Make sure that your website is implemented with high-security features. In addition to this, showcasing your privacy policy, shipping policy and return/refund policy at the checkout adds to your website’s credibility. All these positive signals are major determinant of customer’s decision-making process. This Magento checkout extension is capable of adding new HTML blocks on the checkout page. You can use this feature to add the logo of trusts, iframe links for website’s policies etc. Make sure that the links do not redirect the checkout page. You can either use iframe, pop-up or open the links in the new tab.
Make account registration optional– It is a tested fact that we should never keep shopper’s personal information like credit card numbers, addresses etc unless they choose to do so as a part of their choice in their user account. Despite keeping these are useful for the customer’s point of view, we should never force the customer to create an account on the site. Instead, keeping the guest checkout option active like this Magento checkout extension would be more helpful. You can also adopt a social login option that will be used to sign in the customers without actually filling a registration form. The information from their social media account can be used to create a user account in this case.
Finally, You can find uncountable ways to optimize your checkout process. Here, in this article, I have explained by taking a Magento checkout extension as an example. However, there are several other checkout modules and extensions for other platforms that comes pre-optimized on the above-discussed fronts. The PrestaShop one-page checkout module is one such PrestaShop checkout extension. A competent checkout page should be necessarily optimized on the discussed fronts.