One of the main reasons people shop online in the first place is convenience, so it only makes sense to grease your online store’s wheels as much as possible.
Your efforts should be focused on your checkout, because that’s the make-or-break section of the buying process. Once the customer has decided that they want to give you their money, your job is to get them through it as quickly as possible, with a minimum amount of pauses that might give them time to reconsider that decision.
Leave account registration for after the purchase
According to one very popular online fashion retailer, removing the necessity to create an account to purchase reduced cart abandonment by 50%. It’s a bit arrogant to assume that every customer who purchases from you is going to want to do it several more times, anyway.
What you need to ask for also varies from site to site. For example, those of us who are selling non-physical products are particularly lucky, since they don’t need to muck around with shipping addresses. For most purchases, however, you only need five things: name, address, payment information, shipping method, and email.
Make forms as simple as possible
Once you’ve simplified what you ask for in the forms, it’s time to work on the forms themselves.
Reduce their numbers, and make their entry as user-friendly as possible with clear, well-placed labels. As we’ve mentioned in our article on mobile checkouts, it’s a good idea to place the labels above or in front of the entry boxes, not in them. Although in-form labels look cool, they also disappear when the customer starts to enter their information, and if something distracts them, they might forget and have to start again.
Also, to supplement most browsers’ autofill capabilities, some companies are taking a page from Google’s book and adding predictive entry to certain forms. In addition to slicing a few seconds off the amount of time that it takes customers to get through the forms, it also has the effect of helping customers to remember complicated addresses that might have taken them a second to call back.
Remove the navigation
Remove the header, footer, and any sidebars during the checkout process. You don’t want your customers leaving the page during this part, anyway.
Removing these elements will also decrease loading time, and believe it or not, a small increase in loading time can be just enough to give your customers pause.
Make it smaller
There’s no reason to have a five-page checkout process when you can easily fit it onto one page. If you’ve followed step one and resolved to ask as little from your customers as possible, you won’t need the extra four pages anyway.
As an equally important addition to this section, make sure that you do whatever it takes to keep your customers on your site. Forcing them to navigate to another service to pay is a common cause of abandonment.
Offer as many payment options as possible!
Make sure you offer alternative methods of payment as well as the few that might seem easiest or most initially obvious.
Yes, your customers might have a card that they can use to make the purchase, but if they have a PayPal or Amazon account, why make them get up, find their wallet, dig out the card, enter the information, and then take the time to remember and re-enter their billing address? Why not just have them use one of those?
Conclusion
Many of these practices are common sense, but what’s hard is knowing that they’re possible and how to implement them.
Remember to minimize the amount of copy on your site as well. Your customers have already decided to buy, so no further convincing is needed. As for instructions, if you’ve done your job right, the process should be intuitive, with a minimum of instructions needed for anyone who’s used a computer before.
Finally, tolerance for form completion issues on mobile devices is even lower than on desktops, so for a more specific article on mobile customers check out “3 Reasons Why You Should be Focusing on Smartphone Users”.