Improve Your Online Checkout Process Before Holiday 2018: Holiday Readiness Series

Shopping cart abandonment is unfortunately way too common, especially during holiday season. Customers state being forced to create an account, extra costs, or too long of a checkout process as main reasons for leaving to shop elsewhere. Improving in this area before holiday should be at the top of your holiday readiness checklist. Offering a quicker checkout with flexible payment options and fast and accurate tax calculations are a bonus so customers don’t have big surprises waiting for them when they click that FINALIZE ORDER button. So what can a brand realistically do in order to improve their checkout process before holiday season kicks into full gear?

1. Get your return policies in order

If you have your return policies hidden deep in your site and not completely clear, you need to consider changing that immediately. 66% of shoppers won’t complete a purchase without reading the return policy first and a whopping 80% of shoppers are deterred by inconvenient return policies. Updating your policies and making them clearly visible during a purchase or your checkout process can be a quick update that will keep shoppers clicking BUY NOW.

2. Uncomplicate your checkout

The best way to understand what parts of your checkout are considered complicated is by having user groups give feedback on the process. However, with holiday around the corner doing that and making changes is probably not feasible. Here are the top comments that have come from our clients user groups when discussing simplifying the checkout process:

3. Test, analyze, review

The accumulation of minor issues can wreak havoc on your site’s checkout conversion and user experience, especially when hit with a lot of traffic around holiday. With testing and analytics, common usability errors that you may not even know exist can be exposed, removing any dead ends in your experience that can leave your customers in the lurch.

Tools like Google Analytics can simply identify problem areas within checkout. Google Analytics reviews will be able to give you insight as to when users are dropping off. So if a lot of users are dropping at a certain point you can investigate that section before holiday and fix the problem. Fixing these issues can be some of the easiest and most effective ways to improve checkout conversions.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Remember- what your customers want is to have a smooth and easy experience this holiday season. They purposefully are shopping online to avoid the stress of waiting in long store lines, so keep that in mind before you ask them to fill out 10 lines of information and jump through hoops to return an item purchased on your website. And remember, if you offer a pleasant experience they will likely want to share about their good fortune socially- so make sure you have social sharing available on product and checkout pages. Updating just a few simple features in your checkout process will give you a strong competitive edge while ensuring you are future ready for Holiday 2018 and well beyond.

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