Getting rid of checkout page anomalies to curb abandoned carts

Getting Rid Of Checkout Page Anomalies To Curb Abandoned Carts

Checkout is one of the prominent pages which experiences most of the bounce backs. A major proportion of Shopping cart abandonment reasons as researched and explained by Baymard Institute contains the checkout page anomalies.

What are these checkout anomalies and what’s the solution?

It's not just about the defect in the checkout page design that curbs your conversions but also the elements that do not relate to deign are responsible.

Elements like Sipping cost, Hidden cost, and payment options, etc.

So this list would actively consist all the possible anomalies from design to usability point of view.

1. The high shipping cost Even in the above report, it shows how 61% of visitors will abandon your shopping carts if you include hidden or extra cost like shipping cost on your products.

Also, Paypal once revealed that 43% of shoppers abandoned a shopping cart because shipping costs were too high.

In this situation, you can curb this anomaly by simply allowing free shipping on your products. More than 50% of the total online retailers offer free shipping to eliminate this biggest cause of cart abandonments.

2. Compulsory account creation It's surprising to discover how various stores still asking for compulsory account creation before making a purchase. Perhaps they are unaware of the fact that 35% of customers would abandon their carts because of this. I understand that accounts are important for lead generation, repeat sales, and personalized shopping experience, but using default account creation form as the only option is not a solution here.

If you are so into user accounts, you need to provide your customers with some alternative options too. Do you want to say "Get the hell out of my store if you do not want to create an account"? I guess not. But your compulsory account creation says no different than this.

Provide the alternative options like Social login for those who want to create an account, and Guest checkout for those who do not want. It's always the best option.

3. Long and complicated checkout process Due to the lengthy and complex checkout process, you may lose 27% of your potential sales. Today, website owners have become wise enough to provide the easiest and shortest checkout processes to seal the deals. Moreover, customers today have already developed the habit of these easy checkout processes.

In this time, if your store does not have an easy and short checkout process, you will automatically direct your customers to your rival's site.

The complexity and length of the checkout process are relative terms which depend on various factors: 

Number of clicks to reach the checkout page from product or product listing

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Number of fields in the address form on the checkout page.

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Number of pages to load and reload during the whole checkout process.

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Ease of entering the data in the fields, assisted by placeholders perhaps.

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Ease of editing the shopping cart on the checkout page. Etc.

page.

To simplify and shorten the whole checkout process you can adopt the following tips:

Quick checkout- Try to reduce the number of clicks required to reach the checkout page. You can do this by using a quick checkout button on the product pages. This button will directly take the customer to the checkout page in a single click.

Lesser details- Reduce the number of details being asked from the customers. You can do this by removing those details which are not important for you. For example, don’t ask for Telephone number if you are already asking the Mobile number. There are various checkout extensions that allow the admin to enable/disable checkout fields from the back-office itself.

Lesser pages: Reduce the number of pages. You can switch to a one-page checkout system by simply installing an extension. However, the number of pages do not matter if you are asking only the important details and keeping it simple. In fact, sometime multi-page checkouts are found to be

better in handling the payment options. It's an optional choice.

Placeholders: Make it easier for the customers to enter their data in the checkout fields. You can assist them by using the placeholders to give an example of the kind of data required in that field. Omitting the placeholders while designing any kind of website form is considered as a big mistake.

Edit the cart: Make is easier for the shopper to edit the cart content and product quantity. Any shopper might want to remove a particular product from the cart or increase/decrease the units of the product they want to purchase. Through Ajax based carts you can make it easier enough, and that too without reloading the whole checkout page to update the cart.

Trust Issue: Shoppers do not trust any website easily enough to provide their credit card details. This happens when websites fail to communicate the online transaction and other related safety measures they take. If your website is secured with Norton, McAfee, or any other security layer, let you customers know about them. Moreover, let them know that you use verified MasterCard, Visa, American Express etc payment gateways to conduct the transactions. So, customers can safely make the transactions.

To conclude This is how we can fix most of the reasons for shopping cart abandonment on a checkout page. Moreover, you will also need a cart abandonment recovery plan to recover those sales which get abandoned despite all your efforts. You can leverage an abandoned cart email reminder extension for this purpose. Such systems track the orphaned carts on your store and automatically send serial email reminders to those customers.

Perhaps, a combination of tips explained above and a reminder extension is all you need to fight shopping cart abandonment on your store.