The ecommerce checkout page do's and don'ts
Checkout user experience
A badly designed checkout page is often the common factor of basket abandonment. The average basket abandonment rate across e-commerce is 68%. We tend to find a huge proportion of this stems down to poor, unfriendly and hard to navigate checkout pages. If an ecommerce website requires you to register before allowing you to checkout it is estimated that 86% of customers will change their behaviour.
One of our e-commerce websites, The Rare Skills Gallery focussed on a well-designed checkout page making good use of white-space to lay emphasis on call to action buttons. You can see the full site here - http://www.rareskillsgallery.com/.
Getting it right
Even though basket abandonment rates have substanially fallen from 2012, there are still some factors to consider. We speak a lot about the power of a mobile responsive website, in this context it is similarly as important. The needs of mobile experience shoule be considered at every step of the design and development process of the checkout page. Mobile basket abondonment is said to be around 97%, this is epitomised by the vast majority of shoppers browsing and purchasing later on another device. But could you improve your checkout for mobile and get some of them to buy right now? This is arguably the hardest task to successfully achieve.
Wrapping it all up
Ultimately, the checkout process should be as convenient as possible for the user, with a guest checkout option for those users that don’t want to sign up. To prevent basket abandonment, you need to ensure the page is well-designed and avoid confusing users - simplicity really is the winner here!
So there you have it, a simple guide to ensuring your checkout page is tip top that could really help you become a more credible ecommerce brand, significantly increasing your online transactions. If you want to talk through options in more detail, and would consider outsourcing some of this activity, then we would love to talk to you about what we may be able to offer!
