Optimizing Checkout Pages for Mobile

Imagine yourself walking into a busy grocery store. Although the store has a large number of customers, you see many abandoned shopping carts. The reason for such abandonment being the slow checkout process.

A lot of E-Commerce stores face the same situation every day. With rising cart abandon rate and a decline in organic traffic, the only way out is to optimize the checkout page of your online venture. Here, we will discuss 10 steps of achieving a complete satisfaction of the customers and boost the store revenue.

Trim Down The Pages And Scrolling

Many web experts have revealed this fact time again that when it comes to checkout, the lesser the clicks, the better it gets. This is how it works, first of all, you funnel down the entire checkout process on a single page.

Now, it may be a case that the page gets a little longer and needs too much scrolling. Here, you need to remove some possible fields and condense the page width to keep the vertical scrolling to the minimum.

Remove The Distractions

One of the first steps to lowering the cart abandonment rate of your store is to get rid of any promotional stuff from the checkout page. Once the customer arrives at the final checkout stage, remove the typical shop navigation. Customers are generally visiting your store from their mobile devices to shop on-the-go.

The process is focused specially on payment options. Use mobile wallet solutions such as Google Wallet, PayPal, or Amazon Payments. These options require fewer inputs from the customer.

Auto-Detect Payment Card

There are a lot of card processors including which do not require the customer to select his credit or debit card type, such as Authorize.net. The first 4 number are automatically examined and an image of the card vendor also displays for confirmation. Look for card payment providers that offer multi-currency support and compare them.

Here, we are talking about reducing a step and saving up to 20 seconds during the checkout phase. For anxious mobile customers, this is a lot of time.

DO NOT Up-Sell

It is quite temptation to up-sell or cross-sell a customer during checkout. But it is not a good practice for business. Remember, we are not at the physical supermarket checkout aisle.

Rather than trying to sell more, the focus must be to keep everything simple and motivate the customer to revisit the store. Too much distraction may also lead to losing the interest of the customers and they may abandon their shopping carts.

Let Them Checkout As A Guest

Nothing frustrates a shopper more than the mandatory registration at the final stage of shopping. Most of the E-Commerce websites can be seen with this drawback where the customers are asked to create an account before they can make a purchase.

Forcing the new shoppers to register before checking out is a huge threat to making profits. Enable guest checkout feature which has the minimum possible fields. Use features like using GPS to auto-fill the address and let them leave the store happily.

Don’t Make Them Zoom Too Often

This is yet another frowned upon stage a shopper goes from, followed by the mandatory registration discussed above. Small tabs for info fields forces a customer to pinch-and-zoom again and again. This takes a lot of time and adds friction to the shopping experience.

Optimize every page of your E-Commerce website for the mobile screen. Nobody would want to visit a store where pinching and zooming to enter the information takes more time than actual shopping.

Use Same Billing Info As Shipping Info

Though most of the websites have this feature, but it is still worth mentioning.

It seems like a total waste of time to fill the same information twice for the billing part and that of shipping.

Improve The Checkout Speed

Did you know that more than 60% customers abandon their cart because the page takes some time to update after a certain field is entered by them? Target the speed to less than 3 seconds, or you will simply lose the game. We recommend hiring SEO outsourcing service to always stay current and ahead of the next change.

For speeding up the checkout, avoid using any heavy graphics or any unwanted scripts. Use Google page speed to improve responsiveness and perform a stress test to check for the performance during high traffic.

Use A Progress Bar

Manage the expectation of the customer for time and number of steps left to making the purchase. A progress bar assures the customer that he is following the right steps at all times.

Pre-inform the customer about the number of steps required for the final checkout. The journey to checkout gets less likely to be abandoned once the people know the total steps it would take.