Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – you’ve just spent, time, money and great deal of effort on creating your site. Your landing page pushes all the right buttons, your product descriptions are engaging and the promotional pictures are on the money. You’re getting a steady stream of engaged visitors coming to your site each day, but your sales figures don’t seem to add up – so what’s responsible?
A well-executed checkout process can offer a marked upturn in sales conversions – turning shoppers into buyers and stopping them from abandoning their cart. If done right, it can be the winning edge between meeting or exceeding sales targets and discouraging prospects from purchasing from your site.
Many ecommerce site owners resign themselves to the false assumption that shopping cart abandonment and low conversion rates are a fact of life – but they’re not. If your site is underperforming, then it might be time to optimise your checkout page. In the latest infographic from visual website optimizers Wingify, we’re shown how a holistic overhaul of your checkout process can transform your business from the inside out.
Your checkout process is that last hurdle that turns visitors into customers, so it’s crucial to get it right. According to ecommerce researchers at the Baymard Institute, 68.83% of online shopping carts are abandoned – equivalent to around $4 trillion of potential purchases. And worse still, 63% of this is actually recoverable – meaning that companies are throwing away a huge opportunity to generate revenue and boost conversion rates.
So what’s stopping your prospects from seeing their purchases through?
According to the data, the most common mistake is really quite simple: failure to give prospects everything they might need to make an informed, confident decision.
So what makes the perfect checkout page? It’s all about getting the right mixture of the following four elements:
When reviewing your checkout page, view it from the perspective of a buyer. Follow the checkout process and work on improving each step in turn, from the initial customer login through to the order summary and confirmation page.
Of course, the perfect execution of a checkout page requires insights into your audience and what they’re looking for. You’ve spent time investing in a site that’s unique, so your checkout process deserves the same amount of care if you’re to engage prospects enough to see through their purchases. No two retailers are alike, and so no two checkout processes should be either.
The only way to find your own version of ‘perfection’ is to continuously test and review your checkout page to see what works and what doesn’t.
And the best way to achieve this is through A/B testing. This simple process involves comparing a test version against a control version of the checkout to see which delivers the better sales conversion rate. By testing, you can see a concrete breakdown of what works before committing to a major overhaul.
So if your site isn’t delivering, take action – test, plan and strategically experiment with your checkout process to transform your sites from an underachiever into a sales powerhouse.
