With the holidays happening now, you can expect an uptick in the number of customers visiting your online store. This is obviously good for business, but it is easy to find yourself unprepared for an influx of customers, thus missing out on a great opportunity to optimize your profits. Simple steps such as will go a long way in making sure that all your customers have an excellent experience shopping and paying at your online store. Some of the checkout process improvements that will have the greatest impact include:
Form simplification
When shopping online, it is usually necessary to fill out forms, particularly during checkout. Some online retailers usually use this opportunity to gather as much information about their customers, in a bid to do things such as creating targeted advertisements for them. However, when a checkout form is too lengthy, your customers will be more likely to abandon shopping carts rather than go ahead with payment. In addition to the fact that it can be tedious, collecting too much information also raises suspicion from most potential clients.
To avoid this, have your forms be designed to be as short as possible. It’s easy to identify the most important pieces of information you need from a client in order to sell them something, and your forms should ideally not require more than this.
Get rid of the navigation bar from the checkout page
Once someone has gone through your website and selected items, you of course want them to complete the checkout process by actually making the purchase. It has been noted that having a navigation bar at the checkout page reduces the chances of this happening, as your clients are more likely to move to another part of the site. Removing the navigation bar from the checkout page makes clients focus on the actual checkout, and reduces visual clutter on the page as well.
Don’t force people to sign up in order to make purchases
Of course, it’s a good idea to have clients become members of your website, so that you can interact with them more. This allows you to carry out processes such as targeted advertising and sending them email publications. However, this should be an option rather than a prerequisite to buying anything off the website. Forcing a potential buyer to sign up when they don’t want to will simply make them give up, as you would be increasing the number of obstacles they have to go through in order to make the purchase.
To have new clients become members of the websites, you can instead use other methods of reeling them in such as offering discounts and access to special features if they sign up.
Use multiple payment options
Your payment gateway should not be limited to just one form of payment, such as using a credit card. People have more choice in deciding which method of payment to use when shopping online, and accepting as many of these payment methods as possible will increase conversion rates. Implementing this to make the checkout process as smooth as possible will require you to work with merchant solution providers who are familiar with most forms of payment, including newer ones such as mobile money.