How To Decrease Checkout Abandonment [7 Tips and Design Inspiration] | by Dan Fedirko | Elligense | Tech in elearning and ecommerce

In average, 75.6% of customers don’t finish their purchase, reports SaleCycle. It means that ecommerce website is losing 75.6% of potential revenue. But checkout abandonment rate can be decreased by developing a smooth checkout experience that removes hesitation.

In this article, I will cover checkout page optimization tips and design best practices. They will help you create better customer experience and increase conversion rate.

Baymard Institute interviewed 1799 people to establish top reasons why customers are leaving the checkout page:

With the reasons revealed, let’s find out how to fix them.

The number one reason people abandon their carts is additional costs, such as shipping and taxes.

To improve this part of your checkout process, consider showing all the additional costs as soon as possible, not in the last minute.

To improve customer experience even more, include multiple shipping options for user to have a choice on time and costs of delivery.

And the last, show exact time of delivery, instead of ‘3–5 business days’. Or even let your customers choose the date when they want to receive a product, it will greatly increase customer satisfaction.

According to a study provided above, 37% of buyers would abandon a checkout if a website asks them to create an account.

Guest checkout allows visitors to purchase from your store without creating an additional account. For instance, they can check out in one click with their PayPal account. Such technique hugely speeds up the purchase process and as a result, increases conversion rate.

Consider placing a guest checkout option at the beginning of the page, before login/registration fields.

However, keep in mind that though guest checkouts increase conversion rate, you don’t receive customer contact information, so you can’t interact with them after purchase.

The optimal solution can be to implement social media login, which allows you to extract customers’ info and still satisfy them in terms of speed.

With one-page checkout, customers can easily access all the input fields. This reduces friction on the checkout process, by removing additional page loads and provides the user with a clear vision of steps. Plus, it is good for autofill feature, we will talk about in the next tip, as allows filling all the fields at ones.

Eventually, one-page checkout decreases the bounce rate and improves conversion. Below you can see a great example of the checkout page.

According to a study from the Baymard Institute, 28% of customers abandon their carts because of an overly long checkout process. In today’s world, people are not willing to waste time filling tons of unnecessary fields. So your task is to make form completion process as efficient and quick as possible.

Here are some strategies to help you:

• Keep forms short. Put only those forms that are really necessary to finish a purchase.
• Place labels above input fields. User experience experts report that placing labels above input fields (not below or on the side) makes it easier to scan and fill the form.
• Position inputs in one column. When fields are laid out in one column as in the example above, people make fewer mistakes and complete the form faster.
• Use Autofill Fields. Tests have shown that autofill feature alone can increase conversions by 4.85%. Modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox save previously filled data and allow users to fill forms in one click. To make this happen your fields must have proper input names like email, name, address for a browser to recognize them.
• Use form validation and design it properly. Why? Users should easily find out where an error is and how to fix it. So use colors and icons to highlight errors as well as successes.

• Make buttons and checkboxes easily tappable on mobile phones. Remember that the tap area is 48px.
• Use shipping address as billing address. This solution will save time by removing the need to type form twice. It can be easily implemented through a checkbox.

As Baymard Institute reports, 19% of customers abandoned checkout because they didn’t trust the website with their credit card information.

Online shoppers are really concerned about the security of the checkout process and your task is to give them no reasons to worry. If you are not using trust signals yet, their implementation can hugely increase your conversion rates.

Among effective trust signals are:

• Social proof like reviews and rating (e.g. rated 4.8/5 based on 5,000 orders)
• SSL certificate, HTTPS protocol and direct mention that shopping is secure. In addition, you can use third-party security validation, such as McAfee, Norton, GeoTrust, etc.
• Clear links to customer service, returns, terms and conditions.
• Payment options logos like PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and ideally ‘verified by Visa’ sign.

The Baymard Institute study also shows brands which are most trusted by customers in terms of security. Among them are companies which provide antivirus software like Norton and McAfee, as well as Google and the BBB. However, SSL providers like GeoTrust, Comodo and Thwate don’t increase a sense of trust as users haven’t heard of them.

This tip addresses issues #9 and #10 in abandoned cart reasons list at the beginning of the article.

The financial industry is rapidly changing and now customers have lots of wallets and payment options. Include all of them to satisfy every customer. The most popular payment options are:

• Paypal.
• Amazon Pay.
• Google Pay.
• American Express.
• Apple Pay.
• Stripe
• Square
• Visa Checkout.

Moreover, larger ecommerce websites are now offering split payment, credits and pay after delivery options that increase conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Showing count down timer on the checkout page will psychologically push a customer to finish purchase faster. The example below shows ‘your order is reserved for…’ countdown timer that approved itself being effective.

This tactic can also work well with exit-intent popups. These are popups that are shown when a user is going to leave your page.

Setup a special offer for people who are leaving the checkout process with a countdown timer included as shown on the example:

Our company has expertise in ecommerce industry and would like to offer you a free audit of the checkout process on your website. Just fill the form here with a message “Checkout audit [link to your website]”.

We consider examples below worth looking at and get some insights on how your checkout page can be designed better.

Modern visitors value time, so the checkout process should be smooth and quick.

Let’s go through all the tips ones again:

1. Show final costs and shipment arrival date as soon as possible
2. Use guest checkout
3. Implement one-page checkout
4. Optimize forms
5. Display trust signals to decrease checkout abandonment
6. Allow different payment options
7. Include Countdown Timers to Create Sense Of Emergency

Which one would you implement first? Write in comments 👇

Apart from these tips, pay attention to user interface design of your checkout page. If you need professional designers’ help, Elligense team can provide you with that.

And don’t forget to apply to the free audit of your checkout process. Just fill the form here with a message “Checkout audit [link to your website]”.