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[CHECKLIST] Optimizing eCommerce Checkout Experience

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Quiqup⁠

partnered with 1500+ brands like H&M, The Petshop, Victoria’s Secret, Sporter, Virgin, Sephora, The Giving Movement and many other successful brands in UAE to improve post-purchase experience throughout delivery, return and fulfilment.

We have spent extensive time analysing what made them successful.

Here is the checklist of the best optimisation tactics to increase eCommerce conversions, boost sales and improve overall customer experience to bring your customers back to shop again.

Reputation / Trust

Customer Reviews

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Displaying customer reviews so customers can get a perspective from your existing customers. You can feature consumer reviewers for your website and even for specific products, ideally you would display these with the product images and a detailed description. If you don’t have social proof from your customers, you could also consider displaying ratings from Google or TrustPilot.

Overall brand review widget on home and other important pages

Product review with pictures

Shipping and payment method logos

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In order to build more trust with it is important to display shipping and payment method logos during the checkout process. This gives reassurance to your customers that your business is affiliated with trusted and reputable companies that consumers already know and trust.

Payment logos

Website security

Payment options

Security assurances

North American customers said a “secure” website had one of the biggest impacts on a “positive” shopping experience. However, going through additional security steps after customers confirm an order adds extra friction and negatively impacts their experience.

Many North American customers may not be familiar with additional ecommerce security layers such as

3D Secure⁠

, which have been mandatory for European merchants but also lead to additional friction in the payment flow. To streamline the checkout experience and prevent illegitimate payments, it’s important for North American businesses to invest in robust fraud monitoring that can work in the background to detect and block fraud.

eCommerce businesses can promote buyer trust and security during the account creation process prior to checkout. For example, allow customers to check out as a guest, reducing the amount of personal information you collect and store. If you do require customers to log in to complete a purchase, give customers the ability to connect to their existing social media accounts. This keeps their personal information stored in the social media profile, rather than on your website, and helps expedite the checkout process.

The Top Three Buyer Trust and Security Errors

18% of checkouts did not allow customers to checkout as a guest

90% did not allow customers to create an account by connecting to a social media profile

22% did not display an order summary that could be easily adjusted

Security visuals: Display security visuals, such as a padlock, to reinforce that the page is secure.

Cart recaps: Show a summary of all items ordered to instill confidence.

Card brand: Automatically display an icon for the card brand (such as Visa or Mastercard) after the card number is entered.

Guest checkout: Allow customers to checkout as guests.

Account creation: Let customers create an account by connecting to their social media profile.

User Experience

Avoid pop-ups

Most internet users have developed an aversion to popups. It is therefore recommended to steer clear of using pop-up windows during checkout, ideally this is avoided completely on your website. If you want to use this prompt a special offer or a discount make sure that offer is given during the checkout experience without distracting the customer from the checkout process. Finally a pop-up could also have negative effect on your website performance and potentially negatively impacting your customer experience.

Guest checkout options

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Forcing you customer to create an account during the checkout process, can make it easier for returning customers and given them a faster checkout when they come back to buy more! However it creates a barrier for your new customers and it slows your new customers down. You could even consider testing a one-step checkout process and asses how this affects your conversation rate. It is important to consider that not all customers would respond well to a one-page checkout process, as it may feel less secure to some users.

Minimise lengthy forms

To ensure the checkout process moves along smoothly, keep things focused on the sale and avoid asking for unnecessary information. That means keeping forms to the minimum: name, email and address information, followed by payment details. Checkout is not the right moment to ask customers to sign up for newsletters, take part in surveys or other activities that are not directly related to their purchase.1.

Design clear CTA on your checkout page

Your call-to-action shouldn’t fit the same design as the rest of your page. Otherwise, the CTA will blend in with the rest of your ecommerce store, failing to draw the attention of your customers. Instead,

design your CTA to stand out⁠

and be featured prominently. In most cases, it should appear above the fold.

Using a slightly different design style can really make it pop out at customers, draw their eye to the CTA, and motivate them to click.

Include a CTA on each landing page

Every landing page your ecommerce site has should have a call-to-action somewhere. We recommend

limiting landing pages to a single, clear CTA⁠

so that you don’t confuse customers. Your ecommerce site should be designed to guide visitors through to purchase, and any landing page without a CTA fails to do this.

Optimise for mobile devices

More than 50% of all online shopping is done on mobile devices. If you aren’t optimizing your mobile experience, you are likely falling behind your competitors and missing out on sales. Optimize your site for mobile devices, ensuring that you consider the navigation and responsiveness of the design. Steadily improve your mobile experience to keep customers engaged and buying while they are on the go.

Fifty percent of customers we surveyed said they do more than half of their shopping from a mobile device, with 62% saying it’s “very” or “extremely” important for a website to be mobile friendly. If your ecommerce checkout flow isn’t tailored to a smaller screen—for example, if the checkout page doesn’t automatically adjust to the size of the device—customers are more likely to abandon the checkout flow completely. In fact, while more than 50% of eCommerce traffic comes from smartphones, carts are abandoned on mobile at more than twice the rate of desktop.

Supporting digital wallets, such as

Apple Pay⁠

Google Pay⁠

, can help expedite the

shopping experience on mobile⁠

. A separate Stripe analysis found that close to 37% of American consumers and 34% of Canadian consumers have either Apple Pay or Google Pay enabled on their device, creating the opportunity for businesses to offer a one-click payment experience that, on average, is three times faster than having to manually enter payment details.

The Top Three Mobile Optimization Errors

76% of checkouts we analyzed did not support Apple Pay

88% of checkouts did not support Google Pay

13% failed to surface a numeric keypad to enter card information on mobile

Penetration of Digital Wallets

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digital_wallet_ecommerce_adoption_stats_usa_canada

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Checklist: How to Optimize for Mobile

Responsiveness: Ensure your form automatically resizes to the smaller screen

Keypad: Display a numerical keypad when customers are prompted to enter their card information

Wallets: Offer mobile wallet payment methods and ideally only surface them if you know they have been set up by your customer and are usable on their current device.

Use a progress indicator

Your checkout process mostly consists of multiple steps. That’s why you should always display a large step-by-step progress bar at the top of the screen, so your customer knows exactly which stage of the process they are in. Make sure the breadcrumb trail is clearly visible and easy to understand.

A progress indicator displays where in the checkout process a customer is, what steps are still to follow, and helps them gauge how long the process will take. This is especially useful for multi-step checkouts that can be more complicated and challenging to complete. These make the process simple for customers and guides the user through checkout.

Localization

North American businesses need to support a local experience for their international shoppers, like adapting the payment methods they offer to their customer’s location. While cards are the predominant online payment method in the US and Canada, 40% of consumers outside the US prefer to use a different payment method. For example, bank transfers are the most popular payment method in Germany, and almost one-third of Italian customers prefer to pay with a digital wallet.

Local Payment Methods Among Top European eCommerce Businesses

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ecommerce_payment_methods_top_european_businesses

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When we looked at the top North American eCommerce businesses with a presence in multiple markets, the number of payment methods they offered did not increase. Instead, they successfully adapted their payment methods on a per-country basis to optimize for local conversion. For example, the same North American eCommerce business would offer Giropay for German customers, iDEAL for Dutch customers, and Przelewy24 for Polish customers.

We’ve seen the impact that local payment methods can have on checkout conversion. In a separate Stripe study, we analyzed the impact of accepting popular European payment methods for Austrian, Belgian, German, Dutch, and Polish shoppers. By enabling these methods, businesses saw a 40% incremental increase in sales, and transaction fees were reduced by 0.4 percentage points (while these cost savings may sound small, they can quickly add up).

Impact of accepting popular European payment methods on sales in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and Belgium.

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eu_ecommerce_payment_method_volume_stats

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We estimated the increase in net-new sales that could result from adopting a local payment method. We first predicted a business’s sales volume if they had never adopted that payment method. Then, we analyzed the difference between actual sales volume and our predicted volume.

Supporting the right payment methods doesn’t only apply when expanding internationally; it can also be a way to offer your customers extra flexibility and convenience, especially for larger purchases. For example, buy now, pay later services let customers immediately finance purchases and pay them back in fixed installments over time, and can result in an increase in sales.

Buy now, pay later payment methods

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klarna_afterpay_ecommerce_payments_volume

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Checklist: How to Localize Your Checkout Experience

Language and currency: Identify the top countries into which you want to sell and make sure you localize the checkout experience by translating the page and displaying local currency.

Dynamic Fields: Change the payment fields to capture the right information for each country. For example, if your form recognizes a UK card, you should dynamically add a field for postcode.

Local payment methods: Dynamically surface the right payment methods in your checkout depending on where your customers are located or which device they're using.

Installments: Consider offering buy now, pay later services if you have a high average order value and if they’re popular where your customers are based.

Checkout Page

Checkout Form Design

Customers expect a fast, intuitive ecommerce payment experience, with 19% of consumers saying they would abandon a purchase if it took more than one minute to checkout. However, it takes 56% of customers, on average, more than three minutes to complete a purchase and 17% blame a long and complicated checkout experience as the reason for abandoning an order in the past year.

The highest performing

checkouts⁠

are made up of dozens of small optimizations executed seamlessly. For example, displaying descriptive error messaging when customers enter the wrong payment information, supporting address auto-complete, and allowing customers to save their payment information for future use. In a separate Stripe study, we found that offering address auto-complete can increase conversion by close to 0.8%, and using specific error messaging can increase retry rates following a decline by as much as 3.5% (for example, changing the message from “your card was declined” to “your card was declined. Try a different card”). These increases may seem small, but they can quickly add up—especially for eCommerce businesses with high transaction volume.

The Top Payment Form Errors

42% of top businesses made at least three mistakes when formatting payment information or displaying error messages; these mistakes include not alerting customers when they entered an invalid card number or tried to pay with an expired card

51% did not support address auto complete

36% did not format card numbers in blocks of four digits for easier data entry

77% did not allow customers to save their payment information for future use

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native_auto_fill_auto_complete_checkout_ecommerce

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Checklist: How to Design an Optimized Checkout Form

Error messaging: Highlight payment information errors in real time

Number formatting: Add spacing to card numbers, displaying them in blocks of our to six digits for easier data entry

Default address: use the same billing and shipping address by default unless customers want to manually add a different shipping address

Address auto-complete and auto-fill: Optimize address collection by supporting both native autofill (which uses information saved in a customer’s browser) as well as address auto-complete (which enables typeahead completion)

Saved payment information: Allow customers to save their payment information for future use so they can check out with just one click

Display a summary of the order

Show customers a summary of their order before they submit it, including the products they're purchasing, the total cost, and any applicable taxes or discounts.

For subscription businesses

An increasing number of companies are turning toward

subscription models⁠

as they offer the ability to create a reliable revenue stream. In addition, consumers have grown accustomed to signing up for digital subscriptions, with our survey showing that, on average, North American consumers pay for 2.5 active subscriptions.

Like ecommerce companies that process one-time payments, subscription businesses should prioritize the same checkout optimizations we’ve covered: form design, mobile, localization, and buyer trust and security. However, there are additional optimization opportunities that are unique to subscription businesses.

The Top Three Checkout Best Practices for Subscription Business

44% offered a free trial

53% let customers enter a coupon code directly on the checkout page

16% offered reusable payment wallets such as Apple Pay or Google Pay

Post-Checkout

Send a confirmation email

After a purchase is made, send a confirmation email to the customer. This helps provide reassurance and can also serve as a reference for the customer in case they have any questions or issues with their order.

Flexible Delivery / Pickup

Provide clear shipping information

Be transparent about shipping costs and delivery times. Display this information prominently on the checkout page, so customers know what to expect.

Free shipping threshold

Consider offering free shipping for orders above a certain basket size. This can encourage customers to add more items to their cart to reach the free shipping threshold.

Fast shipping options

Offer fast shipping options for customers who need their order delivered quickly. This can be an additional source of revenue, especially for customers who are willing to pay extra for faster delivery.

Estimated delivery dates

Provide estimated delivery dates during the checkout process. This can help customers plan their purchases and manage their expectations regarding when they will receive their order.

Same-day delivery

Consider offering same-day delivery options for customers who need their order urgently. This can be a competitive advantage, especially for customers who need a product quickly.

Local pickup

If you have a physical store or warehouse, consider offering local pickup options for customers who prefer to pick up their orders in person. This can be a convenient option for customers who live nearby and want to save on shipping costs.

Ready to take your post-checkout experience to the next level?

Schedule a call with one of our experts at

quiqup.com/lets-talk⁠

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