A big struggle for the retail owners is the shopping cart abandonment.Abandoned shopping carts are a hurdle for online merchants. On average, 60% to 80% of the visitors abandon their checkout cart. This is caused by the virtual window shopping, but it also happens because the website has a complex checkout process.
For sure, if you optimize your checkout, you will get more sales. In the lines that follow, we will tell you what methods to use to facilitate the checkout system. We will explain it starting from WooCommerce platform, but the strategy applies to almost all platforms.
Have some rules
In order to focus on what you really need from your customer, you should start by tracing down some rules.
Start with asking for some mandatory fields. If you don’t really need the personal information of your customer, don’t ask for it. If you sell an online service, for example, there is no need to ask for the physical address. Or if you only need the zip code, don’t request the address.
After you established what information you really need, reassure you ask for it in a coherent order. Don’t ask for the street name, phone number and after that the city or the country. This won’t make any sense to the customer.
Now it’s time to think about the customer’s behavior. And one thing we know for sure: customers make mistakes. Very often it happens to be an error, but the customer doesn’t receive any warning. Make sure you display an error message or you highlight the area where the customer should return and correct the info.
Make sure you save the info as the user fills in the form. This is the way to make sure they are not asked to fill the information again if there’s an error.
Offer customers account so they can log in any time they place an order and skip the step where they fill the same information again and again.
With Stripe and WooCommerce, you can even use a payment gateway to save the customer’s payment method.
Centralize using plugins
Plugins are a blessing and they also help the checkout process in WooCommerce. They can centralize the information, enhance the checkout and of course boost conversions.
Don’t be scared to dismiss the cart page. By default, WooCommerce sends the customer to the cart, where all the items are shown, where he or she can revision the order, apply a coupon and so on. In most of the cases, customers don’t need to check the cart, so removing this step leads to increased conversions.
Checkout Field Editor is built by the WooCommerce team itself. It is actually an interface where you can change the tags, fields and so on.
WooCommerce Direct Checkout enables users to go straight to a full checkout form. Install the plugin, then go to WooCommerce and Direct Checkout. There, mark the “Enable” box.
Next time your visitors want to see their cart, they will be shown exactly the checkout page.
WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor (Manager) Pro is a paid version of the plugin mentioned above. It has more excellent fields and also there are alternatives where you can create the fields.
If you can, remove steps
We concentrated on WooCommerce mainly, but these rules can apply to any platform. It is a checked fact: if you reduce cart abandonment, you will sell more. If you need more information about the way an optimized checkout flow can help your business, contact us. We are eager to help your business grow!
