Online businesses of all sizes, from all industries and with any experience have one common problem. This is cart abandonment.
The list of reasons why shoppers add products into their carts and then leave the web store without completing checkout is long and rather vague, so we would not discuss it now. Instead, in this article we have assembled a sound set of 7 most effective ways of improving the checkout process based on the most typical cart abandonment reasons.
Table of contents:
Let guests checkout
Be fair with prices
Offer a variety of payment options
Present gifts, coupons and discounts
Clean up the checkout
Provide auto-completion
Make the checkout simple
Conclusion
What is Guest Checkout in Magento
Issue: guests are not allowed to check out.
Put yourself in your client’s shoes, and imagine you were browsing a website for a while, read certain descriptions and reviews, finally found the suitable item, added it to the cart – and faced the obligatory login or registration procedure. This will probably make you annoyed and discouraged from proceeding with your purchases.
Also, checkout without logging in would prove an especially convenient option for that part of your target audience that shops from mobile devices. Ecommerce studies have found that the conversion rates for logged mobile shoppers and the unlogged ones, that resorted to the guest checkout, were nearly equal. This is another proof that you might be losing a significant share of the potential revenue, subjecting your customers to create an account in order to complete the checkout.
What to do:
- Find a Magento extension that allows your unregistered shoppers to complete the checkout – this is also called guest checkout. Do not insist that your visitors should register, and present creating an account as an attractive option, not an obligation. If with time logged in checkout would become a more popular payment option, you can always disable this checkout option in Magento via admin panel.
- Install a Magento extension letting guests use their Social accounts, Facebook accounts for instance, for a quick registration directly on the checkout page.
Be fair with prices
Issue: extra charges at checkout.
Nobody likes being surprised with unexpected hidden charges, i.e. additional taxes or delivery fees. Even the smallest extra fee, the information about which was absent from a product page, can be a massive put-off factor, leading the customer to question the entire matter of the future purchase.
What to do:
Keep your pricing policy as transparent and reasonable as possible. Magento tax rules are a complicated matter, yet you need to study it thoroughly and know how to manage them. Otherwise, you may gain the reputation of a dishonest and inconsiderate merchant.
It is still the best and more straightforward way to warn about the extra fees in advance, at the product page. Yet, if you choose to inform the customers about the additional charges the checkout page, try to give as clear and logic explanation an explanation as possible.
Offer a variety of payment options
Issue: a poor variety of payment options.
Since ecommerce have become such a global industry, a Magento online store owner should be prepared to serve clients from all around the world. If you are willing to take up the challenge of multi-state retail, you must offer a wide range of customer options, and payment methods are one of the most sensitive areas here.
Naturally, each geographic region, as a rule, has their customary payment option, that might be different from the one adopted at your store. The scarcity of payment options tends to discourage customers from continuing with the purchase and eventually leads to a large number of abandoned carts.
What to do:
It is rather hard and even pointless to integrate to your store every payment option possible, especially if your business does not require that. Still, it is necessary to implement such universal payment methods as Mastercard, Visa and PayPal to your Magento checkout.
What concerns other, less universal payment methods, the best solution here would be to conduct client research and find out what are the most common ways they prefer to pay. When you have decided on which additional payment methods you wish to implement, follow our detailed guide Payment Methods in Magento 2.0 to configure them via Magento admin panel.
Present gifts, coupons and discounts
Issue: no gifts at checkout.
All sorts of gifts, coupons promo codes, discounts, and last-minute offers do not have a direct impact on decreasing the percentage of cart abandonment; instead, they serve as additional encouragement to complete the purchase rather than abandon it. Moreover, for an increasing share of profit-hunters, all sorts of gifts are the major incentives to shop at this or that online store.
What to do:
Magento admin panel provides a wide range of discount and sales configuration capabilities. My personal recommendation would be adding at Magento checkout a discount code for those who buy for the first time or already have an account at your store. Also, offer gift coupons, promo codes and deals to thank your buyers and push them to become your returning clients.
Moreover, today’s ecommerce solutions marketplace is full of Magento add-ons that can easily do this job for you. Showing a block with related products or offering a promo code for the next purchase will improve your post-purchase customer experience and attract new sales.
Clean up the checkout
Issue: a lot of distractors.
The checkout step is crucial for the reason that it is the final one, and in case a customer’s attention diverts, in case they get distracted by a variety of elements or annoyed by the unclear Magento checkout page layout, the potential buyer may never complete his purchase, leaving another abandoned cart behind.
Therefore, you must pay careful attention to the design of the Magento checkout page and comfort of the users who will interact with it.
What to do:
- Keep only the most essential details on the checkout. Unable the escape-buttons like “all categories” or “reviews”.
- Customize Magento checkout by adding the elements that will guide your customer to the finish line. For example, make the checkout procedure a clear step-by-step process by enumerating steps to complete. This way the shopper would know where exactly he is at a current moment. To learn how to customize Magento checkout programmatically, read our comprehensive guide here.
- Exclude the input fields if they require the user to fill in the currently unnecessary information. The longer the shopper stays at the checkout, the sooner he gets annoyed. In this case, Magento one page checkout will be a more convenient option.
Provide auto-completion
Issue: no auto-complete feature.
The interface automation features, widely offered by all the websites in all industries, have caused the customers to have higher expectations about the level of user experience. One of such features that will be undoubtedly appreciated by any visitor is auto-completion. It is usually a very time-consuming task to manually insert your name, address and other details, required at the checkout, especially when it is not the first time you make a purchase at this store.
What to do:
- Simplify the checkout stage by allowing the shopper to auto-complete the fields.
- Provide inline validation before the customer clicks the submit button and the reloaded page will display a set of mistakes requiring correction.
- A good idea is to integrate a Magento module that could automatically identify if the customer tries to use a PO box both for shipping and billing addresses.
Make the checkout simple
Issue: the checkout procedure is too complicated.
Imagine that your customer has already experienced enough hardships to find a suitable item to buy. Or, he or she is in a hurry and want to make a purchase fast. A complex, many-page and time-consuming checkout process can cause any person to lose patience and abandon their shopping cart.
What to do:
- Integrate the checkout page with a chatbot that could answer the most typical questions. To learn about the importance of chatbots in the modern ecommerce, follow the link here.
- Adopt a one-page checkout extension for Magento. With that module, you could place all the details on a single page that reduces the number of page reloads, visualizes the checkout, and enables the shopper with complete control over the process. This is one of the ways to make checkout in Magento fast.
Conclusion
It is not an easy task to equip your Magento store with a checkout that could be 100% effective. But if you keep in mind the reasons for cart abandonment above and try to apply the tips we’ve mentioned, your sales rate, as well as the number of return clients, will definitely improve.
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