Checkout is the last page your customers visit, before submitting the order. Unfortunately, it is often also the main reason for shopping cart abandonment. If the customer behavior analysis shows that most of your clients leave your website without submitting the order, you are obviously doing something wrong.
Luckily, there are few things you can do to improve your checkout page, making it more convenient, informative and easy to use. To have functional checkout page follow our advices:
Start from simplifying
The times of checkout pages with multiple boxes to fill out are long gone. No-one likes to spend too much time trying to provide all information marked as mandatory, especially if it has little to do with the order. The most current trend is to ask only about the most important information.
How to decide what kind of information is important and what is not? If you sell software products, which can be delivered via internet, remove the postal address box from the checkout page and ask only for an email. How much information do you get from asking your customers about their credit card type? It is one of the most confusing questions, difficult to answer for many less experienced customers.
When you are asking for any technical data (credit card number, CVV code etc.) always provide your customers with additional hints on how to find the correct answer.
No need to register right away
Online stores, which ask customers to create a new account before they can access their shopping carts are doing it wrong. Adding items to the cart and then checking out is the easiest way to calculate the total cost of the purchase. Allow your customers to move between the shopping cart page and product pages as freely as they want to and ask for registration once they are done with their shopping.
Easy to find buttons
Your customers will never click on the Checkout button if they cannot find it on the product page. The same applies to all other links important for the purchase. Make sure that all of the buttons are conveniently located and marked with bold colours. Simple tricks, such as switching to the “safe” shades of green instead of red, the colour typically used for danger signs, can increase the number of clicks and lead to more successful orders.
Add a progress indicator
The more complex is the registration process, the more annoyed the customers will be if they do not know how much longer it takes to complete it. To make it more convenient, add a simple progress bar, which provides customers with information about the already completed stages of registration process and what comes next.
Keep the checkout page clear
Nothing is more distracting than links and ads popping up everywhere on the checkout page. If the customers have to leave the page to complete the purchase they might never come back. Instead of adding unnecessary info, focus on what is really important: highlight the information required to complete the purchase and the details of the order.
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Marta Gromadzka is a writer and editor with a wide variety of experience, including writing for websites internationally and editing books on many different subjects and in a variety of formats.