The User Experience at Checkout
User Experience is the term given to the overall flow of a website or app and how the customer experiences it, and this is often created by a UX (User Experience) designer.
Believe it or not, if you have a poor UX flow, this could be costing you thousands of dollars in revenue each quarter, or possibly even more. One major aspect of the user experience as related to an online store is the checkout page.
The final page at checkout should be just as customer-friendly and engaging as the entire buyer’s journey. Otherwise, you may end up with a high cart abandonment rate, which is one data metric that all businesses would like to avoid.
Here, we’ll explore how to optimize your checkout and why it matters to do so.
The Online Experience
Let’s say that you have a beautifully designed website. The flow from page to page is perfect, and the content is easy to understand, engaging, and offers your customers an emotional connection to your product. All looks to be in perfect working order, right?
Well, if all of the aforementioned is true and you see a high customer abandonment rate at checkout, it’s probably time to revisit and restructure your checkout page.
The online experience must be engaging from start to finish. With this in mind, you must not only cater to customers of all demographics and financial backgrounds, but you must also offer an enticing and friendly shopping experience from beginning to end.
Often, consumers reach the final stage in the buyer’s journey and then lose interest. This means that an event has occurred, which has impeded their purchase, and now it’s up to you to find out why.
Many times this can be directly related to a poorly designed checkout structure, which might include attributes that turn your customers away from the purchase.
Fixing Checkout Issues
It’s quite common for any online retailer to have cart abandonment issues, no matter the product, and the price. This is why businesses and marketing teams spend significant time and resources on the end-user experience.
A few common areas to fix when looking to optimize checkout are the following:
- Removing Purchase Barriers
These are often in the form of signs or banners that pop up just before a customer finalizes his or her purchase. The function of these signs might be a form-fill or questionnaire, where a customer is asked if he or she is new or returning, then the customer is prompted to fill out trackable information, which can also be done upon first visiting the site or as an added option after purchase.
- Streamline Checkout Steps
The checkout process should be easy, like a cakewalk, and usually is limited to two or three steps. Any more steps required might tire your prospective customer and cause them to abandon their items at checkout. Reducing these steps will help to mitigate any abandonment issues you’re experiencing
- Optimize UX FLow
Your checkout structure should match nicely to flow along with the entire site. Often if a buyer goes from familiar territory to a foreign-looking page, he or she might be alarmed and think a scam is in the works.
Going Forward
All customers like being catered to, and they know when something is amiss. Ensuring that your site is optimized for a perfect buying experience from beginning to end will correlate to having happy buyers instead of a higher than acceptable abandoned checkout rate.
