Improving Online Shopping Experience Part 7: Streamline Check-Out

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In the seventh part of this article, it’s important to streamline your check-out process with relevant recommendations, a progress indicator, and an order summary and confirmation.

• Relevant recommendations: This can include suggestions, recommendations etc. Make these as relevant as possible.
• Remove the header, navigation and footer to enclose the check-out process and minimize distractions.
• Provide a progress indicator to show customers where they are in the process.
• Provide a choice of payments methods. Sometimes users don’t feel comfortable with providing credit-card information, therefore providing other payment options such as PayPal or any other trusted local payment options can decrease drop-offs. Make sure the third party displays total amount to be charged before asking any payment information.
• Link to your policies in context, such as providing a privacy policy link when asking for an email address and a security policy link near the credit card field. This instils confidence in users.
• Provide a summary of the order page and allow customers to verify information and allow them to change it if necessary before confirming their order. This is also a good time to restate the estimated delivery dates and allow them to change their shipping method if desired.
• The final call to action “Place Order” should be prominent. Don’t lose customers at this stage by providing them with other options.
• Once the order has been placed, display a confirmation page, with an order number, any savings, and any printing functionality as well as a summary of the customer’s next steps or options for example “Confirmation email” or “view order details”.
• If you wanted your new customers to check out without registering then at this point it would be a good time to ask them about this option and whether they wanted to register. You can highlight some benefits about creating an account so that it encourages them to signup.

 

Take Action

While reading these techniques, you might have noticed areas where you can improve. While others may be quick fixes, others take patience and time, but results for both will indefinitely show as time goes on. Keep looking at your analytics to see if these changes are improving your online shopping experience for your customers! If you feel any are left out, or have found any useful tidbits, please feel free to comment below!

Source: Smashing Magazine