Let People Pay You God Damit!

One of the first things I do when I take on a new client is clean up their checkout process. Not as sexy as driving lots of traffic, but a quick win and very effective.

Most stock-standard checkouts will have an abandonment rate of 60 to 80%. If you compare that to an offline store, it’s like six out of ten people bringing the product to the shopping counter and then turning away and saying “Nah, I don’t want this anymore.” The poor old store manager would go crazy!

The saddest thing is that most businesses don’t even measure their shopping cart abandonment rates.

So how do you avoid this calamity? You think through it very carefully, apply some best practice principles and then watch your sales improve.

The lowest hanging fruit are:

1. Minimise the text the user has to type. People hate forms. Auto-complete where possible, remove unnecessary fields (do you really need their phone number if it’s an info product?)
2. Remove navigation once the user is in the checkout. Enough browsing, time to buy!
3. If it’s a digital product, you don’t need address details. Just name, email and credit card details.
4. Allow people to purchase in their home currency. It will cost you a bit extra in merchant fees, but it’s a far better customer experience, improves conversions and reduces complaints.

There are lots more best practices, but these are the easiest to implement quickly.

As an example, recently I cleaned up a client’s checkout process and they got a 18.7% conversion improvement across the board…and doubled their mobile revenue.

Here’s a tip have a “why did you abandon” survey if they exit, this will give you MASSES of brilliant data.

Remember, make it easy for people to buy, and they will.

Neil