Best Practices to Make Your Checkout Design Interesting

E-commerce business is soaring high every year because of the convenience of online shopping. People love to view and shop their favourite items,at their convenient time, sitting in their homes or their workplaces.

There is a huge market of customers who opt for online products. Hence, it’s extremely important that ecommerce websites, are beautifully designed and user friendly, thus attracting customers to your site.

One of the most important pages of an ecommerce website is its checkout design. After selection of a product, when the customer adds the product to bag or wish list, they are directed to the checkout page, to complete the remaining procedure needed for placing an order to purchase the product.

Sample Checkout Design

If the checkout page is complicated or boring it may result in customers leaving the site without any purchases, thus impacting conversion ratio and sales.There are many customers who select the product and try place an order, but they abandon their cart because they don’t get proper shipping or tax related information while making payments.

This is a bad sign, because one single page is affecting your business and turning your customers to competitors. Hence it is essential that the checkout page is simple and user friendly.

The graph as per recent research clearly shows that approximately 26% of the users abandon checkout due to complex processes.

In this article, I have summarised a few essential points which will help you to make your online website checkout design interesting.

Let’s check them out.

Best Factors for an Interesting Check Out Design:

1. Avoid Extra Costs:

55% of the shopping cart abandonment is due to extra charges like taxation, shipping and other fees. After selecting a specific item with a price mentioned on your site, the customer moves to the checkout page for placing an order.

Here, if the customer faces lots of unwanted surprises in the form of extra charges, which increases the price of product selected to a large extent, he may cancel his purchase.

To avoid such situations, it’s advisable to add additional costs in the shopping cart, so that the customer is aware about the total price before proceeding for checkout. In short, display of the final price before checkout, enables them to quickly decide on the purchase of the product.

2. Account Creation Optional:

This is another big reason why customers abandon the site during checkout.

If you have a look at the above picture, almost 34% of the customers, instantly abandon the checkout page because, they had to create an account on the site wherein they had to fill their personal information. Due to increase in cyber-crime, customers feel uncomfortable in sharing their personal information and hence leave the site without any transactions.

3. Simple Fields:

The lesser the details required for checkout process, the more it becomes smooth and hassle-free.

26% of the customers leave the site due to long, complicated forms which are to be filled up during the process. A few tips to minimise the process are:

• Use “*” for compulsory fields
• Highlight free benefits
• Modification of product or quantity should be simple
• Display error message where improper information is filled
• Display of total cost in shopping cart

4. Linear Checkout Process:

A non-linear checkout process is the one where customers need to go to other page to fill certain details and later move to the previous page to complete the remaining ones. This is confusing, and many clients may walk out of your site without purchase.

Always opt for a simple step by step checkout process which impresses customers. This is also called a linear checkout process. Customer like to revisit the site,where the payment process is quick and smooth.

5. Smooth Browsing and Navigation:

Easy navigations in the search bar and checkout form will help customer choose the required product quickly and will thus improve your conversion rate. If the navigation process is poor or the customer is disappointed with the search bars, they will move to competitors, thus impacting your business.

Even navigation between pages should be smooth enough to leave a lasting impression amongst customers.

6. Shipping address as billing address:

In most of the cases, shipping address and billing address are the same and hence it is better to put an option “Same as billing address” in the shipping field. This saves customer’s time since they need not fill the form field again.

7. Multiple Payment Options:

Limited payment options will restrict purchases and hamper business growth. Since ample payments options are available apart from credit card payments like PayPal, Paytm, Mobile Money Wallets etc. it is advisable to incorporate multiple payment options for flexible payment gateway.

8. Clarity on Form Fields:

Clarity on the fields in the checkout page can be done by adding descriptions to each form field. An example is as under.

You can hide the description behind “What’s this?” link since all customers may not need it.

Another important point is to keep the format of expiry date of card same as shown in credit card to avoid complications.

9. Display Contact Information:

Contact information on the checkout page gives the customer a safe and secured feeling. The customer knows where to reach or whom to address in case of any queries or doubts. They get a trust-worthy feeling when detailed contact information is mentioned in the page, which includes all the branches of the company, their addresses and their contact numbers.

10. Mobile-Friendly Checkout Design:

With the tremendous use of mobiles along with desktops, it is always advisable to make your e-commerce site mobile friendly. Many customers save their selections to wish list, thus taking time to think before making a purchase.

If the check-out design and wish list are mobile friendly, they can instantly place an order through their mobile, when their purchase decision is finalized. This will in turn improve ROI and help in business growth.

11. Highlight Return Policy:

In online business, it may happen that the product purchased by the customer does not meet their expectations when they see it physically, and hence return policies are essential. Highlight them in the checkout process, so customers can view the same easily.

12. Note of Thanks:

Small, but very essential in the checkout page is to mention a note of thanks to visitors visiting or purchasing from your site. It will make them feel connected and motivate them to visit again.

13. Install SSL Certificate:

Any card payments made by customers are very sensitive because it includes their personal information like bank details and passwords. If this information is hacked and misused, the damage is huge.

To prevent such a situation and for safety of customer’spersonal data, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) has made installation of SSL (Secured Socket Layers) certificate compulsory for e-commerce sites. The main functioning of SSL certificate is that it encrypts data transmitted between browsers and servers.

There are many SSL brands and products available that provide SAN SSL Certificate and other SSL certificate to secure websites.

Wrapping Up:

User-friendly form fields are the key to a successful checkout page. The above-mentioned points will help you to cross check some of the basics needed to make your checkout design interesting and appealing.