A great deal of time is spent planning, designing, and developing a website. Just like the products and services, what makes any Woocommerce site always a hit among the users is the experience. The experience is greatly contributed by the process, feature, design and architecture of the website.
Importance of a good checkout
It is a common misconception that a great shop page would bring good sales. Optimising and enhancing the shop page will make your products more appealing and desirable, but it may not necessarily bring in sales or conversion to your site always.
Equal importance must be given to the checkout page too. A good checkout experience will impact — how satisfied the customers are, and how likely will they return to your store. This explains why there is 69.8% of cart abandonment on average, as suggested by research made by Baymard Institute.
One best solution to reduce abandoning is to purposefully design and optimise the checkout. This will result in creating a great user experience and improve conversion rates.
Checkout abandonment and how it affects an online business
Checkout abandoning has a significant impact on online business. They bring the revenue curve down and the sales dipping. That is, in order to get the customers to the point for purchase, you must have had to invest in marketing, operations, and development. When a customer leaves the checkout process after initiating the purchase, it means all efforts to derive the customer till the end of the funnel is all wasted which is a loss of revenue for the business. You must always work towards reducing customers abandoning at the checkout.
It is crucial to identify where the customers are leaving your sales funnel. A clear understanding is enough for you to identify why customers are leaving and work towards optimising it.
Understanding a standard checkout process steps
A checkout process is a series of steps a customer is guided through which have to be completed in order to purchase items in their shopping cart. It is a best practice to follow definite steps for a free flow and good user experience. It is also important to implement a smooth transition within steps and transparency throughout the checkout. The usual checkout process for e-commerce is as follows:
Shopping cart > billing details > shipping method > shipping info > order preview > payment > confirmation.
However this may slightly vary depending upon the industry; like digital products, they may not have a shipping step. These are the common steps seen in a Woocommerce checkout process as well. You can have them in any way you like — in a single page as in the default Woocommerce checkout type or have them split into multi-steps using the plugin Woocommerce Multi-step Checkout or even have a custom-coded complex checkout page.
We will now learn how to optimise a Woocommerce Multi-step Checkout plugin and share some design tips, to have great Woocommerce checkout. We will also be covering a few common issues that lead customers to leave the transaction incomplete.
Best tips for a great Woocomerce checkout
- Speed and simplicity derive conversion
- Mobile-friendly view
- Don’t ask about unnecessary details
- Guest Login
- Discounts and promo codes
- Validators and API Auto-fill
- Importance of a trusted payment system
- Using a progress bar for guidance
- Less crowding is better
Several factors contribute to customers abandoning checkout. Depending on the industry, the target audience, and even the customer, it differs. There are, however, some reasons in common why customers abandon at the payment stage.
Here we are listing a few commonly found issues that lead customers to leave the checkout incomplete-
- The surprise costs and charges in any form, be it in the name of additional fees, taxes, shipping costs, etc.
- Forceful registration and signing up for an account before making a purchase.
- Being complex, and lacking simplicity and convenience without creating a good user experience.
- Issues related to accessibility due to limitations in shipping options and methods
- Concerns over safety and assurance while sharing sensitive data
- Not providing good, trusted payment method options that are popularly used by customers
- Performance issues and errors that affect the seamless and smooth experience of the site
Now stating all best practices for a good checkout, we hope you can reduce cart abandonment and improve the revenue for businesses. You can test and try any or all of these techniques to improve your checkout process. Furthermore, explore different plugins to streamline the checkout process to help you optimise the checkout flow easily.
Originally published at https://www.themehigh.com.
