E-commerce data has overwhelming shown that the majority of abandoned carts occur during the checkout process. From costs that add up to be too expensive, to complicated checkout steps, customers are choosing to leave their carts at the final stage of conversion more than anywhere else in the sales funnel.
For many eCommerce store owners and managers, optimizing the checkout process is difficult. It’s more complicated than rearranging category structure or rewriting product descriptions. Instead, it takes an outside-the-box approach to correcting some of the fundamental aspects of your conversion process.
Why are People Leaving?
In The Baymard Institute’s comprehensive study of 37 highly-trafficked eCommerce platforms, 10 different checkout-specific barriers were identified by more than 1,000 customers as reasons for abandoning their carts:
| 1. Costs were too high (61%) 2. Required account creation (35%) 3. Complicated checkout process (27%) 4. Cost didn’t calculate in real-time (24%) 5. Website crashed/errored (22%) | 6. Didn’t trust site (18%) 7. Poor delivery speed (16%) 8. Poor returns policy (10%) 9. Not enough payment methods (8%) 10. Card was declined (5%) |
As shoppers encounter one or more of these individual setbacks, their rate of cart abandonment exponentially climbs. What this means is that the more of these contributing factors you address, the fewer barriers exist to customer conversions.
How to Correct Checkout Flaws
The easiest way to correct and streamline your checkout process starts by addressing the problems you have the most control over. For example:
- Add multiple payment options to your checkout. A study by SeeWhy showed that conversions across smartphones, desktops and tablets all increased as payment methods were added. Consider easy additions such as PayPal, Google Wallet, Apple Pay, Visa Checkout and other instant-payment methods, in addition to major credit cards
- Alternative payment methods such as consumer financing loans at the point of check-out from Affirm or Bread are adding huge value to online stores. Check out loans, or consumer financing allows merchants to service more customers by enabling the consumer the option to avoid additional credit card debt and rather receive an instant loan and pay overtime on their terms. Additionally, there are customers who prefer to not take out a consumer financing loan but rather place the purchase on their credit card. The problem with that is, customers are then stuck with a sizable bill at the next billing cycle. Nobody likes that. Along came Splitit to the rescue to address that exact issue. Splitit enables shoppers to split their payment into monthly payments at check-out without costly credit card interest or crazy APR’s
- Move account creation requirements out of the checkout process. This can de-complicate the process and remove the burden of account creation. Instead, place it after checkout or make it a requirement for features like a wish list or real-time pricing information
- Display security logos in your footer and at checkout that show you’re an authorized and verified retailer. A study by GetElastic shows that sales can increase as much as 6% by displaying security badges, giving shoppers the confidence to continue their checkout instead of abandoning their cart
- Reduce the number of checkout steps to as few as possible, requiring as little as possible from your shoppers to complete a sale. In another GetElastic study, single-page checkouts trump multiple-page checkouts by increasing conversions by more than 20%! Keeping that number as low as possible makes processing conversions easier
Remember, you can’t change everything and, in many cases, it’s important not to re-tool everything all at once. Start with the smaller, easier changes to your checkout process and see how abandoned cart numbers respond.
Removing Barriers to Purchase
Checkout is the final stage of conversion. Presenting it to your customers in a succinct, streamlined, barrier-free way is going to cut down heavily on the number of shoppers who decide to split before the process is complete. Take a hard look at your checkout process and ask yourself one simple question: “how could this be easier?”
Datacrushers
Datacrushers is a revenue discovery platform and global leader in site-wide revenue recovery and acceleration
Our USP, is “USP.” User, Site Product. We carefully examine all three verticals from every which way using deep analytics, machine learning & AI along with NLP to mine data and to understand what customers are looking for and to present the best ways for merchants to discover the abandoned revenues… site wide.
