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Ways of optimising the checkout experience on your e-commerce site

When shopping on the high street, you could understandably feel frustration mounting if you find yourself in a store with a cluttered layout, leaving you wondering how to pay for items. Another potential, dispiriting drain on your time could be having to wait in a lengthy queue at the checkout.

However, you could inadvertently instil similar dissatisfaction in your e-commerce site’s customers if you have not sufficiently streamlined its checkout pages. Here’s how you could remedy that wrong…

Do you offer a truly mobile-friendly checkout?

You might have assumed so simply because the checkout’s design fits a mobile display – but there is, in truth, much more than this to properly mobile-optimising an online checkout.

The different elements of your checkout design should naturally flow in a way that eases user navigation. Putting all of these elements in the right places is important because mobile has overtaken desktop as the leading platform for e-commerce sales.

In 2017, mobile was responsible for almost 59% of e-commerce sales, with that proportion anticipated to exceed 72% by 2021. However, on mobile, the transaction abandonment rate is 58%, with poor page design and layout often to blame.

Ask for as few customer details as possible

On an e-commerce site, a transaction can’t go through unless it is approved by the issuing bank, which will refer to an array of validation rules to prevent fraudulent transactions slipping through the net. However, this system often requires you to collect a lot of information from customers.

That’s potentially galling to customers who reach your checkout pages only to notice many text fields which they are asked to fill with personal details. To alleviate their alarm, allow return customers to store such details – including their name, address and credit card number – on the site.

At the checkout, you could even implement a mobile wallet system such as Apple Pay. Users of Apple Pay-compatible devices can authorise their payments largely just by, when using Apple’s Safari web browser, letting the device scan their fingerprint or face to verify their identity.

Consider what would be convenient for your particular customers

The recent enactment of GDPR – the General Data Protection Regulation – has obviously tightened up companies’ access to customer data. However, notwithstanding this, you might hold a lot of data which sheds a highly revelatory light on the average profile of your customers.

You might know, for example, the geographic locations from which they tend to shop – in which case, make sure that you display prices in local currencies. Meanwhile, your payment provider could hand you data revealing whether your shoppers primarily buy on mobile or through other means.

We have already advised on how you can retool a web-based checkout to take account of the modern popularity of mobile retail. However, with our web design services, we can also strip out superfluous elements elsewhere on your site. That’s great for helping to prevent people abandoning your site before they even get a chance of seeing the checkout.

Ways of optimising the checkout experience on your e-commerce site
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