Online checkout
We often assume that customers do make their way through the order form, after all, they have already clicked through to the checkout process from their shopping cart. Nothing could be further from the truth! Over a quarter of all online shoppers report dropping out in the online checkout due to poor forms. Take a look in Google Analytics: how many customers abandon pages with forms during the ordering process? Realize what it would do to your sales if these customers did checkout!
The ordering and payment process is one of the most important processes within a webshop: all the customer's previous steps are cashed in here. By creating a clear online checkout, where you ask the customer as little as possible and give them the assurance of the right product at the right price, the conversion rate will increase. Also, with responsive web design, make sure that customers can checkout via mobile or tablet, you can hardly go wrong.
One-step checkout versus multi-step checkout
The winner, of course, is the one-step checkout! Or is it? It turns out that a one step checkout is not necessarily better than a multi-step checkout. The advantage of a one step checkout is that you have all the information on one page and it looks simpler for the customer.
However, there are other improvements to the online checkout form possible that have a greater effect on conversion, such as:
- Number of questions - ask the customer only what is strictly necessary to complete the transaction. Do you really need that phone number? How is the salutation and do you really need the first name, last name and prefixes for the purchase?
- Smart fields - fill in as much as possible already for the customer. For example, based on a zip code and house number, you can already fill in the street and city for the customer. Do you have multiple shipping methods? Then check the cheapest one by default.
- Simplicity - use simple fields in the form such as a checkbox, input field or radio button. Dropdowns and combo boxes customers often find difficult to use, and research shows that the number of dropdowns in a form is one of the biggest reasons customers do not complete their purchase.
So focus mainly on the number of steps the customer has to take, where each interaction with fields in the form is also a step. Reduce the steps, make the remaining steps as simple as possible and enjoy a higher conversion rate! An A/B test gives you assurance that the improvements have succeeded.
And the biggest conversion killer is...
Forcing your customer to create an account: don't do it! One in four visitors leave the checkout process because of mandatory account creation. So these are conversions you are missing because you want to collect data on your customers. But which would you actually choose; less data and more sales or more data and less sales? I assume the former? So never let your visitors create a mandatory account: after all, they are on your website to buy something and would rather not be distracted from that.
Could the ordering process on your website be better?
Does Google Analytics show that your customers drop out of the order process and are you therefore losing a lot of sales? We are happy to look at ways to optimize the ordering process on your website. We can perform user tests to see where the bottlenecks in your ordering process are. Important points that Tomahawk takes into account in the conversion optimization of your online checkout:
- The content/products offered.
- The user-friendliness of the entire web shop.
- Whether the web shop is optimized for tablets and smartphones.
- The order and checkout process.
- The range of payment methods.
