50 Checkout Page Optimization Tips To Improve Conversion Rate

If there is something that truly matters for e-commerce and online businesses to be successful, is their conversions.

Source: Invesp

No matter how much traffic you get on your websites or how much money you spend on developing the product or even the promotions.

But without conversions at the checkout pages, everything stalls.

You need to see whether your website traffic is translating to conversions or not.

Also, why are you getting most of your cart abandoned during checkout?

There are multiple aspects related to the checkout process of your website that is consuming your sales to happen.

But not to worry, as you can optimize these, and here are the best checkout page strategies you need to adapt in order to get high conversion rates.

Contents

Adding Multiple Checkout Buttons

how to optimize checkout button for maximum conversion

To make your visitors purchase, it is important for them to easily navigate your product checkout page.

You need to see the placement of the checkout button is at the right place and it should appear in multiple spots on the product page and checkout page as well.

When a potential customer decides to buy a certain product, he or she adds it into the cart.

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Once all their desired products are added to the cart, they look for the ‘checkout’ button on the page.

And you would want them to add more products into their shopping carts and more importantly to reach at the checkout page.

But you need to make the checkout button as clear and more obvious to click on.

If a customer has to struggle to find the button or lose his or her drive for the purchase, they are more likely to abandon their shopping cart.

Image Source: Neil Patel

The bad placement of your checkout button can be the reason for your increase in the shopping cart abandonment rates.

You need to position your checkout buttons to the spots where visitors can see it, have easy access and click it as well.

Just make sure it appears in their line of vision even if they are not really looking for the checkout button.

The best way to do so is to add multiple checkout buttons on the most sensible and purpose-driven areas of your product page.

This simple strategy will skyrocket your conversion rate and reduce your shopping cart abandonment issue dramatically.

Securing The Checkout Procedure

Security is the one of the prime concerns for the customers who buy products online. And, thus it should be amongst your topmost priority.

People are not going to buy from your online store if they find it untrustworthy.

Even if there is something remotely discomforting or under-confident, buyers are skeptic enough to abandon the cart.

Online fraud is a critical issue and grave concern for online buyers. The paranoia of getting cheated online is overwhelming for people.

In the last five years only, 46% of United States people have been into credit card fraud.

So when most of your visitors have been exposed to some kind of online fraud, they are more alert and conscious with their online buying decisions.

If they don’t feel your checkout process or page secure, they won’t be comfortable entering their credit card details for buying the product.

Make sure you do everything to assure the potential buyers that you have secured the checkout process.

Pro Tip : Put security badges on your checkout page such as McAfee or Norton.

Eliminate The Unnecessary Form Fields

When a buyer decides to purchase products from your website, they have already made up their mind to do it.

You have to make sure they don’t change their course till they make their payment.

And, most of the shopping carts are abandoned at the end of the checkout page.

This happens significantly more when customers are filling long forms at the checkout page entering their details.

So it is better not give your buyers a chance to change their mind and end up abandoning the cart.

Make sure you don’t complicate your checkout process with unnecessary and numerous counts of form fields to fill.

Eliminate the form field which you really don’t need. You need to ask yourself what exact information you want from your customer.

For Example, maybe don’t ask them earlier if the payment mode requires them to enter their name apparently.

Or if the shipping and billing address of your customer is the same, don’t make them type again. Just add a checkbox instead indicating the same.

According to a study, ecommerce websites with less number of form fields to fill on their checkout page or earlier get higher conversion than others.

Pro Tip

One of the best hacks to improve your conversion at the checkout is to make your visitors do micro-commitments.

Make a two-step checkout process rather than putting numerous form fields at one page.

People are more likely to stick to micro-commitments ending up buying the product.

Request your customers name and email only at one page of your checkout process, and ask for credit card details on the next page.

Usually, this hack will boost your conversion rate by 10%.

This also works because when people give out their name and email, they feel comfortable to further give you payment details in the process.

Plus, in case they do not complete the checkout process, you can always email them and attract back to your website with some enticing coupons.

Allow Your Customers To See Their Shopping While They Shop

The very concept of a shopping cart is quite strange. Well, you are browsing through products online and add it to the shopping cart which you cannot see.

You have to wait for the end of your shopping process where you will go to see what you have selected for the purchase.

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This is actually a bit disconnecting for users. You must have experienced this yourself as well.

The problem persists with most of the online stores. So take a competitive advantage here and improve this aspect for your potential buyers.

You need to elevate their shopping cart experience to make their checkout process as smooth as possible.

Here are few tips you can adapt to improve shopping cart experience of your customers :

Show the shipping cost in the total value as early as possible
Offer a “save to cart” feature for potential buyers who are not ready to purchase yet.
Allow your customer to see a preview of the cart at the top of your product page.
Show your customers what they already have in their cart when they add a new item.
Give the total estimate of the cost of all items added in the cart.
Allow customers to checkout without creating an account.
Offer free shipping or at least low-cost

Include An Expected Shipping & Delivery Date

This is one of the most important aspects of buying online and is of concern for customers.

When they are going to purchase the product, they want to know when they can expect the product to be reached at their doorstep.

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Not just that, they look forward to when it will be shipped, reach their city and then finally to their home.

Having an expected shipping date helps customers decide to make the purchase.

You need to mention when the product is going to leave the warehouse which is the shipping date. Then, you also mention when they can expect it.

Offering Your Visitors A Guest Checkout Option

It is important to get as much information from your customers as possible and it only going to help you in customer profiling.

Customer profiling makes it easier to segment your audience based on their characteristics, locations and other factors.

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You will be able to create a more effective email list through segmentation and customer profiling.

Their purchase history, saves, clicks and cart items will help you present them better and more customized offers for higher conversions.

So it is evident why you want to encourage your customers to create profiles but you need to see the difference between encouraging and obligating them.

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Especially if they cannot move further without creating a customer profile, that is actually you forcing them to create one.

This also shows the desperation of a website or online store to convert the customer beforehand.

This actually something can hurt your conversions in the first place, and not really improve them.

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Most Common Reason For shopping Cart Abandon

( make a bar graph or pie chart)

Unexpected Shipping Costs – 28%
Had To Create An Account – 23%
Conducting Research – 16%
Payment Security Concerns – 13%
Confusing Checkout – 12%
Couldn’t Find A Coupon Code – 8%

Well, 23% of users have to abandon their cart because they had to create an account, and that’s also the second most common reason for cart abandonment.

So the best alternative is to offer them a guest checkout where they can buy products from you without giving any additional information.

Guest checkouts do not compel them to make a customer profile to purchase your product.

Image Source: Quicksprout

Also, more than 48% of online retailers believe the guest checkout is the most important factor to increase their shopping cart conversions.

The idea is to not give reasons to people to not buy from you. They want to purchase, just let them.

You cannot bargain your sales with content marketing strategies. Sales is the most important factor here, especially more than your marketing strategies.

So, Remember sales is your endgame and since customers are ready to buy, it is not advisable to give them any reason not to.

Offer Your Customers A Wide Variety of Payment Options

This is again one of the most important concerns of potential buyers. Also a dominating problem for buyers which makes them abandon the cart eventually.

Image Source: Practical Ecommerce

You need to offer your customers all kinds of payment options possible.

If you can stop one person getting turned away from the purchase due to lack of payment options or his/her preferred option, that would be it.

According to a research, 54% of buyers feel having plenty of payment options is important for them while checking out.

It is true that some of the payment options are going to be more beneficial for your business than others.

Then, there will be some credit card company charging higher transaction fees as compared to others

And, more opportunities where it seems like saving money is smart. But, it is not!

You never know that not having that particular credit card company payment mode can cost you numerous purchases over time.

Image Source: Customer Feedback

Customers have their own preferences for the payment. And this can be more discomforting than you think.

You might think that well they can use any payment mode to pay for your product if not that particular credit card.

Well, that’s not true as well. Most of the customers look for a way to gain some bonus points or reward points from their credit card.

Also, they have their preference and reasons to choose the particular payment method, and you cannot take away that.

They are more likely to change their online retailer leaving you rather than not opting their favourite payment mode.

Image Source: Neil Patel

In fact, you should accept more and more types of payment modes to gain leverage over other online retailers.

You can accept more unconventional, new or unique modes of payment options as well.

However do not go overboard with this by accepting bitcoins and other kinds of cryptocurrencies.

Just don’t leave a customer just because they don’t have their preferred way of payment at your online store.

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Make it as encouraging as possible for customers when it comes to checkout process and payment modes.

Take an example of Nike, they offer three different checkout processes to begin with : login to nikeplus, checkout as guest and PayPal members.

Elevate the Shopping Experience For Mobile-users

Before proceeding, just read out these statistics :

In 2020, 50.81% of total web traffic comes from mobile accounts.
By 2021, 53.9% of ecommerce sales will be on mobile devices.
The number of mobile shoppers in the US is expected to increase by 187 million by 2024.
67% of potential buyers or customers have downloaded a retailer app.

Now, what does that tell you?

Well, clearly, more than half of the total web traffic comes from mobile devices, so it is important for you to optimize the shopping experience for mobile users.

Image Source: CleverTap

It is more convenient for people to make purchases through their mobile phones.

You need to optimize your online store to deliver a seamless and mobile-friendly shopping experience to your visitors.

Because if your website is not mobile-friendly, there is a slim chance you won’t make any sales conversion.

The design of your website, loading speed and layout, all helps you increase the conversion rate if only they are optimized.

Optimizing According To Customer Behaviour

Remember the customer behaviour changes as the device changes, so you need to consider the fact that people are interacting with products on a mobile phone.

They are navigating your website using their fingers, not a mouse, so make sure the key elements of your page should be within the reach of their thumb.

For Example, place your checkout button easy to reach and click at different points of your product page.

They shouldn’t have to scroll a lot to find the checkout button because if they had to struggle, more likely the chance they will bounce off.

Also, clicking and typing on the mobile screen changes, so make sure there is enough space between the buttons and texts to click on it.

Focus on using larger font size to improve text input accuracy. Detect the errors on your website in terms of accessibility.

Offering Your Customers Free Shipping

One of the common misconceptions that online retailers have is that if it costs you to ship the product, you should charge the shipping cost to your customers.

Well, it sounds quite fair! But it is not!

You need to understand that your customers do not look at things as a seller or from a business point-of-view.

They see shipping costs just an unfair and overcharged way to increase the product value.

And this also accounts for one of the primary reasons for shopping carts abandonment.

Social proof assures your potential buyers that they can trust you to make their purchase. It makes the purchasing experience more confident for customers.

You can add corporate logos of the clientele or past customers you had to assure your potential customer that you are offering a valuable product.

Image Source: OptinMonster

Social proof is quite helping to psychologically virtue signalling your customers about how it is okay to trust your business and buy the product as it is worth it.

You can also add the reviews or testimonials from your past customers or some significant known people or companies at your checkout pages.

Putting quotes regarding your product from the media houses or any compliments from big brands will also help boost the trust at checkout.

In case you are going to use the corporate logos, make sure you choose the companies of different sizes to target different customer segments.

Giving More Benefits To Your Customers

A potential customer is there to buy the product from your website and chances are they will.

But still what more you can do to increase the perceived value of their purchase to assure the transaction.

Well, there are some assurances and benefits you can lead with the offer that helps customers to move forward with their purchase.

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For Example :

If you offer your customers free shipping and free returns, to begin with, it will catch their attention.

They might want to buy the products but are not sure about it.

Giving them an offer that they can return the product and also the profit of no shipping cost will make them more inclined to buy.

Don’t worry about your free return policy as most of the time the product is not returned.

But offering the peace of mind will encourage them to make the purchase.

So there are tons of other benefits and advantages you can offer that can make a reluctant buyer into a paying customer at the moment.

Lead your offer with some great benefits, maybe something that gives you a competitive edge over others.

Offering Free Shipping When Customer Crosses A Threshold

Offering free shipping right away to your customer is one winning strategy. It compels the potential buyer to make the purchase.

However, it does sometimes become tricky to make that happen because free shipping can be really expensive for merchants.

Especially for the long-term strategy, it might not work and no merchant will be able to afford it for a long time.

Image Source: Shopify Community

But free shipping is a really good strategy to pull people in for the purchase and actually make them go through the checkout process.

So how do you ensure it works for you and customers both?

You can always offer free shipping when the customer spends to a decided threshold.

You can set an amount where the cart value needs to be reached in order to apply free shipping on the order.

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This will encourage customers to buy products. They might be just a few dollars away from the threshold you decided.

Just because to save money on shipping, they would add another product to order while checking out.

Make sure you add a progress bar of how much more customers have to add items in order to get free shipping.

Using Images On Your Checkout Page

If you have pictures in your checkout page instead of the just listing of added products, you are more likely to get conversions.

It is about showing the customer what they are buying. Making them connected to the product so it motivates them to move further with the purchase.

Make sure your shopping cart also shows the product image. It makes the purchasing decision easier.

Image Source: AB Tasty

Also, rather than just written text, pictures make your website more appealing and engages the customer.

One of the primary functions of these preview images show up in shopping carts is to assure customers that they have added the right product.

Customers often add the wrong product to the cart or maybe different version, color or size of the product.

It gives a visual confirmation to the buyers and makes them comfortable with the purchase on a psychological level.

Image Source: Ecommerce Guide

Also make sure you use faces in the product pages as according to a study, it increases the conversion by some significant percentages.

Prefer to use images of the people in your product pages or your landing page. It can be someone wearing or carrying your product or using it.

Remember consumers are drawn to people and faces. They tend to attach the products emotionally with its application and purpose.

Let Your Buyers Know The Shipping Cost Early In The Checkout Process

This is certainly amongst the most pressing concerns of a potential buyer when they go to buy products online.

So if you really set out to resolve this issue for your targeted buyers, people are more likely to notice.

More than that, it will give you a competitive edge over other numerous online stores who do not pay attention to this.

Image Source: Nielsen Norman Group

The problem is that online retailers only show the shipping cost at the end of the checkout process.

Sometimes even at the edge of the payment checkout when they notice suddenly the total payable amount increases in the name of additional shipping cost.

This is really annoying for the purchasers!

Most of the time it is not about whether they do not want to pay for shipping costs or won’t but the fact they have been played to make them reach to the end is infuriating.

What you can do is show the shipping cost as early as possible while checking out, so buyers can make their decision for them.

You can do this by adding a shipping calculator to mention an rough estimate of the additional cost here.

Setting Up A Default Billing and Shipping Address For Returning Customers

You need to think of your customers in order to make them buy products from your store.

Image Source: WooCommerce

People hate to fill forms. Especially to fill the repeated information on the forms just makes it time-consuming, repetitive and frustrating.

This goes for all the returning customers to your store. It is true that people have to fill this in order to move further for the order, so they do it.

But it just creates hurdles and conflict in the purchase. So, the best you can do here is set up a default billing or shipping address for returning customers.

And when you also eliminate the unnecessary form fields as you already got the information, it makes their experience for the purchase better.

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There is some information you can make it to the default or auto-fill such as E-mail address, shipping address, billing address, name etc.

They all can be saved for future purchases removing the resistance from the customer side while filling the form again for a new purchase.

Optimizing Your Product Details

The lack of information creates fear and doubt and buying the product for customers without proper knowledge of it is not anything different.

You need to optimize your product details to satisfy your customers for the smooth purchasing decision.

Lot of buying decisions never get made. The cart abandonment issue is quite high with the online stores.

And even if you fix almost everything optimizing your checkout page as much as possible.

Here are some factors you need to optimize giving more reasons to your potential customers to buy the product and checkout at the moment.

Add product summary to your product details
Include all the highlighted features in short
Use the branded content for product information
Add more of a informative images

Add A Product Video In Your Product Page

Just like the product details, a good product video demonstrating all the features, benefits and uses make the purchase more confident for customers.

What better way to visually understand the product and see how it looks and works.

Image Source: Baynard Institute

It really helps customers take the decision and see what to expect from the product when they get it.

Now, make sure you make a very short and captivating video to convince customers for the product.

It should also demonstrate how people use the product, and not just plain presentation of specifications and features.

Show Pre-Order Availability In Your Online Store

You can always allow pre-ordering of the product on your online store.

It is definitely going to increase your sales whenever you are out of the product in the inventory.

Image Source: Groupthought

Or in case after ordering some product customer chooses a product that is no more in the inventory, make sure that they know that they are pre-ordering the item.

Tell them when the product will be available or when they will get the product for this pre-order purchase.

Lot of e-commerce companies offer to use their own e-wallet system to pay the amount where if the price drops from the time they have orders, they will get some extra cash or points in their wallet.

Add a Product Summary

You cannot just add name and number from the vendors’ or merchant’s end. There must be more information regarding the product.

You should add a summary of the product details which give the glimpse of what your product is about.

All the basic information includes color, size, dimensions, highlighted features, model number etc should be mentioned in your product summary.

Putting all the required information to the product summary will help customers gain more confidence in the product and make more aware decisions.

Allow Customers To Update Their Quantity Or Remove From Cart

Don’t make your customers go back to the product page for any reason when they are already on the checkout page.

For Example, sometimes customers want to remove a product added to the cart or add more quantity of the product already added.

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More times they have to go back to do something after landing on the checkout page, higher chances for their giving up the whole process will be.

Allow them to add in your cart with more customization options on the checkout pages only.

Let them also remove the product easily on the checkout page. This will reduce the cart abandonment from your customer base.

Try Experimenting With Single-Page Checkout Process

You can get into the long-going debate on whether single-page converts better or multi-page does.

But the fact remains true that no one can really know for sure because it varies according to the case study.

There has been enough experimentation to prove how multi-page checkout converts way better than single-page checkout.

Image Source: Out of the Sandbox

Well, there are benefits to reap from both sides, so it is highly encouraged to experiment with both for your online retail business.

Some benefits of single-checkout process :

Single-checkout processes appear to be shorter, encouraging customers to get it done quickly.
All the form fields are on the same page making it less complicated for the potential buyers to go through.
According to some behavioural research, the fewer the clicks is needed to fulfil a task, higher conversion it will get.
Fewer clicks doesn’t give much time to customers to open a comparison tab for the same product or skip it.

Single-page checkouts is also great when you are selling :

low cost products
impulse purchases

However, here are few things you need to remember when you design you single-checkout process :

Do not overpopulate the page with information
Use Google auto-fill to default the form filed filling for faster checkouts
Make sure you integrate smart forms
Auto-detect the type of the credit card from the first four digits of the card.

Showing The Final Price Before They Checkout

This is more important than you think. Especially if you had this experience where you expected the total cost at checkout to be different that it shows.

Well, this happens all the time. That’s why more and more e-commerce websites are incorporating the strategy to their online stores.

Customers have this idea of their perceived price getting increased due to addition of other costs such as tax, shipping etc.

This is something that puts them off continuing the order further as they feel to be exploited or cheated to pay more than agreed.

So to combat this, you need to be as honest as possible with the customer from the beginning.

That means, no sudden change of total pricing from one page to another. You just show the total pricing as early as possible with the right breakdown

One of the highly efficient ways to increase the average cart value of your purchase orders, is to recommend them related products at checkout.

Not just it increases the amount per purchase but also improves the sales conversion for your business.

Plus, good suggestions related to the product they are buying can be actually helpful too.

In cases for buying electronic items, customers want to make most of their purchase and see they are getting everything they need with the purchase.

So additional items showing up in the checkout will help them know what more they can add to their purchase or might be missing it.

Putting Detailed information About Shipping Methods On Checkout Page

You don’t need to wait for customers to look for what shipping methods are available to get the product.

Make sure you detailed out all the available methods of shipping for the product they are purchasing.

Mention the expected delivery time to their doors along with what extra charge they have to pay for it.

Confirm Your Customers That Item is Available

It is really frustrating to go through everything reaching at the checkout page only to find out that the desired product is not available or not in stock.

This also increases the chance of abandoning the whole cart by the customer including other products that were not out of stock.

Make sure customers get to see at the very product catalog page whether the particular product is available or not.

You can use the inventory tracking system built-in to the ordering procedure.

Also, in case the product is not available, let your customers enter their email address, so they can be notified when it will be back in stock.