Regardless of how well designed your products pages are, if your checkout is not optimized for user experience, buyers will seldom go past it.
According to Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.57%. That means for every potential 100 customers that add an item to the cart, only about 30 of them end up making a purchase.
Think about it. How much revenue will you generate if you can convert the 70 customers leaving your cart instead of losing them? It can be a huge chunk of income, we bet.
Today, we’ll take a look at some of the foolproof checkout experiences and why you should copy them.
We’ll also discuss:
- How guest checkouts can help reduce cart abandonment rates
- The benefits of an express checkout
- The elements of a great checkout experience
- How to minimize distractions on your checkout pages
What Makes a Great Checkout Experience?
Your checkout process is the most critical step in your customer’s buying journey. A well-designed checkout page will help reduce cart abandonment, boosting your business revenue.
Here are the elements of a great checkout experience for online shoppers:
- Clear and highly visible call to action (CTA) buttons
- A clean and mobile-friendly checkout page design
- Clear product specification and description
- Multiple payments options
- Transparent checkout process
- Progress indicator
- Ability to make changes and edit items added to the cart
Ecommerce Checkout Page Best Practices With Examples
To grow your online shop sales volume, you need to lower cart abandonment rates which is made possible by giving customers an easy time shopping online.
Although it takes a lot of effort, tests and fine-tuning, an ideal checkout experience minimizes customers’ distractions and makes the purchase process smooth. When visitors find the process complex, lengthy, and the design clunky, they’re likely to leave before completing any orders.
Today, we’ll show you examples of seamless checkout experiences in ecommerce stores.
1 – Including a Guest Checkout Option
The main benefit of the guest checkout is a faster checkout experience. The fact that users can buy a product without creating or logging into an account makes the process seamless.
New customers find guest accounts effortless since it’ll take them less time to complete their orders, plus it comes with fewer commitments.
Guest accounts can help reduce cart abandonment on your online store. Studies show that about 34% of users abandon the cart because a website requires them to create an account.
H&M is a good example of an ecommerce website offering guest checkout. The website allows customers to proceed with guest checkout, requiring essential information like payment information, billing address, and shipping information to complete their order.
Other ecommerce websites like Oboz also keep it straightforward and prioritize a guest checkout.
After the customer completes the order, they allow them to create an account where they can save their information such that in future, they don’t have to fill it in when making a purchase.
Now you must be wondering, between the guest and account checkouts which one should you use. Although we highly recommend guest checkout we advise you to use both of them but prioritize the guest checkout just like Oboz.
However, here is how both checkouts stack up against each other.
2 – Express Checkout for a Faster Checkout Process
Express checkout allows users to purchase products using PayPal, Apple Pay, Shop Pay, or Google Pay without having to provide their contact and card information.
Usually, this checkout method minimizes form fields that a customer needs to fill to complete an order, such as shipping, invoicing, and payment information.
With just a click of a button, customers can complete the order by simply logging into their existing accounts using either of the payment gateways. This speeds up the checkout process and reduces the chances of buyers abandoning the cart, increasing your business sales.
A website like Toad & Co is an excellent example of an online store giving users a seamless checkout experience using the express checkout. With just a click of a button, users can complete an order by directly proceeding to pay using Paypal, Google Pay, or Shop Pay.
3 – Clean, Minimalistic, and Enclosed Checkout
Minimalist checkout design removes unnecessary tabs, menus, or other content that can distract users and prevent them from purchasing. A minimalistic checkout system will help your customers complete their orders faster since fewer distractions exist.
Honestly, it’s easy to get caught up in creating a flashy checkout page design.
Colorful and exceptional creative elements help to capture your audience’s attention. Despite the effort, too much variation can cause chaos.
Since our brains are hardwired to symmetry, neatness and order, a clean checkout page will minimize distractions and allow users to concentrate on completing the order.
Nike is the master of a simple and minimalistic checkout page design.
Their checkout process is divided into three straightforward steps:
- Delivery options
- Payment
- Order review
Because the business is known to offer expensive items, the latter step minimizes the likelihood of making a mistake when completing the order.
Their smart autofill features, such as the address, expedite the checkout process.
To make their checkout as distraction-free as possible, the company has stripped the header at checkout. This minimizes the chances of the user clicking to other pages, leaving the order incomplete.
CAT is another fantastic website that uses a clean and enclosed checkout page. They’ve also removed the header navigation and added a progress indicator, which shows their customers the stage they are at in their checkout process.
CAT also includes an order summary section in the sidebar. This allows customers to verify their orders and edit their carts before completing the purchase.
4 – One-Page Checkout for Convenience
Customers want a more straightforward checkout process. Fewer stages in the process mean less friction for online buyers, which decreases the chances of them leaving the order incomplete. This is where a single-page checkout comes into play.
A one-page checkout combines all checkout fields onto a single page where the user sees all checkout-related information in one spot. Customers can complete all of the necessary information without leaving the page.
MeatEater is an excellent example of how to implement one-page checkouts effectively. They offer a reasonably simple one-page checkout requiring customers to fill in only the essential information. This streamlines their checkout process, allowing buyers to complete their orders fast.
If the buyer needs to verify their information and cross-check their order, they can do so without clicking back to previous pages.
There’s been hot debate whether a one-page checkout is any better than a multi-page checkout. A single page works due its simplicity and convenience. Unlike multi-page checkouts, users can complete an order without clicking to multiple pages.
However, we would advise you to thoroughly test each of them and see how they perform.
Decrease Your Cart Abandonment Rates
The high cart abandonment rate is the nightmare of every online store owner. It can be frustrating to spend thousands of dollars driving your leads down your conversion funnel, only for them to fall off on the last step.
Checkout optimization is the real cogwheel of any ecommerce store. Your design can either encourage your customers to buy your product or push them to leave the website and, in fact, never return.
At Tadpull, we help you track your buyer’s journey. We use predictive analytics to unveil your data sets, revealing where your customers spend time, what drives conversions, and how to keep them coming back for more.
Book a free growth consultation with us where we analyze your store’s most critical points of friction across the customer’s path to purchase and a roadmap on how to fix them.