Most store owners spend a great deal of time focusing primarily on the UX of their ecommerce website, but they forget a key component that really ties the whole thing together: the checkout page. Your ecommerce site’s user experience plays a very important role in customer retention, revenue growth, and the overall user experience.
It’s critically important for you to track the number of visitors to your ecommerce store, as well as the ones that end up completing a purchase. If a large percentage of your inbound traffic simply bounces off without purchasing anything, you’re doing something wrong.
Not everyone’s interested in buying, obviously, but if you have a large amount of traffic just dropping off at the checkout page, it’s probably because you haven’t optimized your checkout page properly. This needs attention as it is the crux of the entire ecommerce checkout experience.
Why Optimize Your Checkout Page?
Creating an optimized checkout experience for your customers is not as easy as it looks. There are a number of important factors that go into improving your conversion rate. One of them is the overall checkout experience that you can offer to your clients.
Shopping cart abandonment is a serious issue going into 2022, with many businesses looking at different ways to streamline their checkout experience. Essentially, checkout abandonment is when a customer decides to abandon the payment after initiating the process. If a customer goes all the way to the checkout page and stops short of making the payment, you need to ask yourself what you’re doing wrong.
Optimizing your checkout pages is the first step, and can go a long way in helping improve revenue generation. Shopping cart abandonment is a very important metric that affects the growth of your business, as many cart abandonment stats confirm. Customers generally abandon checkout due to several reasons, including but not limited to:
- Complex checkout steps: if a customer has to jump through several hoops to get to the end of the line, they will probably abandon the process midway. Don’t overly complicate your checkout pages.
- Hidden charges: if a customer reaches the end of the checkout experience, only to find that any additional fee has been tacked on to their purchase costs, there’s a strong chance that they’ll abandon their cart.
- Doubts over security: Similarly, if you aren’t using secure payment methods or providing proper trust signals, there is a high risk that customers will abandon their cart.
- Lack of payment or shipping options: similarly, if you don’t offer a decent variety of payment and shipping options to your clients, your cart abandonment rate is probably going to be higher. It’s important that you offer convenient payment and shipping options to improve your cart abandonment rate.
- Slow hosting: if it takes a long while for a customer to get to the checkout page due to slow hosting, they are probably going to abandon their carts.
8 Best Practices for Optimizing Your Checkout Page With Examples
Now, if you want to optimize the entire checkout experience, here are 7 checkout page best practices that you should follow.
1. Allow Guest Checkouts
If you are not offering a guest checkout option on your store, you are missing out. It’s imperative that you offer a guest checkout if you want to improve your cart abandonment rate. Nobody wants to go until the final checkout page, only to find that they have to make an account before they can finalize their purchase.
Example: Crate & Barrel Does Guest Checkouts Flawlessly
It just adds friction to the entire ecommerce checkout page. While there are many checkout page design examples that you can check, we have added one from Crate & Barrel. As you can see, they also offer a Guest Checkout option. The button’s highlighted too.
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2. Create a Summary Page
A summary section on your checkout page or a separate summary page is also an excellent way to reduce cart abandonment rates. When a customer has added multiple products to their order, you should always show them a summary of their order on the checkout page.
Example: Nike Does Summary Pages Right
Expect your customers to tally the price before they checkout, and if you don’t give them a summary of their order, it’s likely going to affect their trust factor. As a result, there is a chance that they will abandon their cart altogether.
The ecommerce checkout page design example above is from Nike, one of the largest sportswear brands in the world. As you can see, they offer a summary on their checkout page.
3. Preview Order Details
You should also give users an option to preview their order details throughout the checkout page or before, so they can always tweak it if they see fit. There’s a difference in simply providing a summary of a customer’s order on checkout, and providing them the option of changing their order if they see fit.
Example: Zeritta Shows Previews With Each Order
Both Shopify and WordPress give you the freedom to optimize the checkout page experience as you see fit, with plenty of checkout page examples to consider. As you can see, the aim is to minimize friction as much as possible and give users maximum flexibility over their order. There are other ecommerce website builders that you can try out too, and most of them also offer similar functionality.
4. Display Trust Badges
The screenshot above is from Best Buy, one of the country’s largest retailers. As you can see, they provide trust badges at the bottom, making it easy for people who are on the fence to confirm their order. It’s one of the most commonly used checkout page best practices. Remember, the aim is to make the purchase as smooth as possible, and by instilling trust in your customers, you can do just that.
5. Add a Progress Indicator
One of the best ways to improve your checkout pages is to make sure that you provide a progress bar. It’s one of the most popular checkout page best practices that helps your customers better understand just how far along they are from checking out.
Example: Ledbury Uses a Subtle Progress Bar
A progress bar makes it easy for customers to get a clear idea about how much information they will have to provide before they can check out. If you see the checkout page example above, you will notice that they show a simple progress indicator. It doesn’t disrupt the amount of information on the page, but it provides a clear indication of the pages you’ll have to browse through before you can finally check out.
6. Use One-Page Checkout
Urban Outfitters is a pretty fantastic example of how to do one page checkouts right. They use a fairly basic one-page checkout to ensure that you can quickly order. Once your information is saved, the entire checkout process can be completed in less than a minute. It’s a clean example of how to follow checkout page best practices to a T.
Example: Urban Outfitters Does Excellent One-Page Checkouts
At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. If you take a look at any of these checkout page examples, especially the one by Urban Outfitters, you’ll realize that all of them try to reduce friction as much as possible. That should be your aim as well when optimizing your checkout page.
7. Maintain Cost Transparency
If you take a look at the checkout page example from Myntra above, you’ll notice that they provide a complete breakdown of the costs at the checkout page. Maintaining cost transparency is very important, so you need to make sure that you provide details of how much the shipping will cost.
Example: Myntra Shows a Full Cost Breakdown
This is very important, and goes a long way in establishing trust, as you can see from Myntra’s screenshot above. The customer should know exactly how much they will be charged when they are about to check out.
8. Migrate to a Faster Host
You need to make sure that customers don’t spend a lot of time moving between pages, and more importantly, your website doesn’t take too long to load.
Cloudways Offers Fast Ecommerce Hosting
With Cloudways ecommerce hosting, you can easily optimize your website and get faster speeds without having to pay a lot of money. Cloudways is a fantastic choice for business owners who are looking to launch their ecommerce store. It’s a fantastic choice for customers who want to launch their own stores.
The WooCommerce Starter Bundle Is All You Need
Start your ecommerce journey today with the WooCommerce Starter Bundle with Cloudways.
How DealDey Improved Their Conversion Rate by Optimizing Their Checkout Experience
DealDey is an ecommerce site that primarily curates daily deals on services and products from merchants around the country. Their website has grown rapidly over a very short period of time, but their checkout process was severely limited.
It was time-consuming and outdated, which affected shopper experience. DealDey worked with Remy Clarkson to identify problems with their checkout process. Remy first started by creating an ideal user persona for DealDey’s customers.
He then created a user flow to identify exactly where customers were dropping off, before creating a wireframe and a prototype.
Source: Remy Clarkson
He then carried out extensive testing, which helped him figure out whether the new page was worth deployment or not. 9 out of 10 customers loved it, which was all the approval he needed. The impact was amazing: DealDey’s sales increased by 15%, and cart abandonment reduced by 34%.
Final Thoughts
Optimizing your checkout page seems a bit complicated, but it really isn’t. As long as you pay attention to what your customers want and take inspiration from these checkout examples, you can easily overcome such ecommerce challenges. As future ecommerce trends continue to change, optimizing the checkout experience is going to play a very important role in the overall user experience.
You can even use abandoned cart email plugins to improve your cart abandonment rate. Once you are done optimizing the checkout page, head towards optimizing your ecommerce thank you with our 10 Thank You Page Examples and Ideas to Boost Conversions.
Q1. What’s a One-Page Checkout Page?
A one-page checkout page is designed to present all the information you require on the same page, allowing your users to view their order information and confirm their order without having to navigate to a separate page. This limits distractions and makes it easy for a customer to quickly complete their order.
Q2. What’s a Multi-Page Checkout page?
A multi-page checkout page requires users to navigate through several pages before they can get to the end and checkout. Multi-page checkout pages allow users to present less information on each page, and guide customers through every step of the checkout process.
Najam Ahmed
I work as a digital content producer at Cloudways. Besides that, I love to read, and i love to play the guitar. Fan of all things Arsenal and the Patriots. Occasional gamer. I like to fly drones too. Jack of all trades.
