Reasons for abandonment include high shipping costs, checkout errors, and the fact that some customers simply want to check prices.
Here are ten ways to improve the e-commerce checkout process, and minimise abandonment rates...
Avoid unnecessary barriers
Now, consumer surveys on e-commerce sites (and, for that matter, any site) are a fine idea, and they can yield some valuable insights, but there's a time and place for them.
On Sears, just as I have added an item to the basket and selected the guest checkout option, my progress to the checkout is interrupted by this:
This is a) annoying and b) a barrier to purchase. Getting the customer through the checkout process is more important than the survey at this point.
Why not ask once the customer has completed checkout, or follow up with an email?
Remove compulsory registration
Customers don't like having to register before checkout. A recent Econsultancy / Toluna study found that 25.6% of online consumers would abandon a purchase if they were forced to register first.
After adding items to your basket, what would make you abandon your purchase?
Sites like Amazon may get away with this, but I wouldn't recommend it for most sites. There are examples of sites which have moved away from compulsory registration and reaped the rewards.
ASOS managed to halve its abandonment rate at the registration page simply by removing any mention of creating an account, and another 'mystery' retailer added $300m to its annual revenues by removing the compulsory registration.
Most US e-commerce sites have seen the light on this issue, with eight of the top ten US etailers providing a guest checkout option.
One that doesn't is Newegg, which could do with a redesign of the whole site, not just the checkout:
By offering customers guest checkout with the option of registering later, you avoid the barrier of registration, but still allow easy registration once customers are through the process. After all, once they have entered address and payment details, all they need to do is create a password.
Enclose the checkout
This is about removing any distractions for customers and concentrating their minds on the task in hand.
Here's why retailers should enclose the checkout:
Reasons for enclosing the checkout
- By leaving out navigational elements, all unnecessary distractions are removed and this allows the shopper to focus purely on completing their purchase.
- Thanks to the removal of these distractions, information which gives the visitor confidence in their purchase is made more prominent, such as delivery details and customer service contact details.
- Security logos and messages are more visible, providing reassurances for the security-conscious shopper.
- It is made absolutely clear to visitors where they are within the checkout process and how many steps they have left to complete their purchase.
- Apart from the homepage link, customers can only head in one direction, towards the payment and order confirmation page.
Ideally, there should be no link that takes customers away from the checkout process, except perhaps a link back to the homepage.
Some customers may need reassurances about shipping times and costs, or returns. This information should appear in lightboxes which don't interrupt the checkout process.
In this example, Sears ticks all of these boxes:
Reaffirm prices and delivery charges
This allows customers to quickly check on the contents of their shopping carts and the total charges before they complete the checkout, removing any concerns about costs.
Provide alternative payment methods
According to WorldPay stats, alternative payments account for 22% of global e-commerce transactions, worth a total of €165bn.
Therefore, it makes sense to offer different payment methods and appeal to as many potential customers as possible.
Clear calls to action
The perfect call to action should be arrived at by a process of testing colour, placement, size etc, but customers should be in no doubt of how to proceed to the next step in the checkout.
On some sites, the calls to action are a little lost below the fold, or else 'drowned out' by other elements on the page.
I've seen worse examples than this, but Best Buy's call to action doesn't stand out as much as it could. Use of colour, and perhaps a bigger button, would improve it:
Show a progress indicator
At every stage during checkout, the customer should know where they are in the process and what remains to be done before the purchase is complete.
One way to achieve this is to have a progress bar across the top of each checkout page, which shows the stages within the checkout process and also highlights the customer's current location.
Let people use the back button
There may be times when customers want to go back a step or two in the checkout to check the address details they've entered, change the email address, and so on.
It should be easy to do this without losing the information already entered, but some sites make the following mistakes:
Browser error messages
If you press the back button during checkout on Hamleys.com, you get this message:
To the average e-commerce customer, a warning is only a cause for concern, possibly to the extent of abandoning their purchase. They don't understand the warning and can?t decide what to do, in case they get it wrong... and most importantly of all, this sort of warning is irrelevant in an e-commerce checkout.
AJAX checkouts
A very different problem that arises when customers use the browser back button is that it sometimes doesn't take the customer where they expect to go. This is mostly a problem when AJAX is used to step customers through a checkout process without moving from one web page to the next.
Using the back button will take customers to the last page they had looked at, which in an AJAX-driven checkout is likely to be the basket page – very annoying if you were on the fourth step of a five-step checkout and wanted to go back to step three! There are many different technical work-arounds to this problem.
Sites should make it easy for customers to navigate back and forth through the checkout, but should also ensure that they can use the back button.
Form design
Form design is worthy of a post of its own but, in a nutshell, forms should be easy to complete and should not ask customers for too much information.
Shortcuts like populating forms with information previously submitted, remembering address and payment details from previous purchases all help to ease progress through checkout.
Careful with coupon codes
Coupon codes are great for customer acquisition, but there can be drawbacks. For one, they alert customers to the existence of a possible discount, which may lead them to abandon the purchase in search of coupon codes.
Here are a few tips on avoiding these risks, some taken from this post on GetElastic:
- Only show the discount code box to those customers that have arrived via affiliate links or marketing emails.
- Issue private discount codes. These are sent to selected customers, and are associated with their email address or login details and therefore cannot be distributed via voucher code sites. However, the very existence of a code entry box will have some customers leaving the checkout to look for them.
- Use the code entry box to build an email list. By displaying a 'how do I get this?' message next to the box, retailers can keep users on site to get their discount code, with the added benefit of gaining a customer's opt-in for future email marketing.
- Link to your own coupon page. Again, this keeps customers onsite, and has the added SEO benefit of appearing in searches for brand name + voucher code.
- Disguise the box. A crafty trick, but making the box less visible, perhaps in a duller colour than other calls to action may mean that some shoppers will not notice it.
- Place a discount code next to the box. This could be a less generous offer than those on voucher code sites, but it could keep customers within the process while still feeling they have bagged a bargain.
- 'Hide' it below the fold. Those that have codes will find it anyway, but other shoppers won't immediately notice it.
- Use of language. This example suggests that customers can 'enter voucher code (if any)', implying that codes may be scarce, and customers might be wasting their time Googling around for one.
Cart image credit: Emutold via Flickr.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario