A prospective customer has reached the point on your site where they’ve decided to buy, the items are in the basket ready to go.
Getting the customer to this point has cost you money. Whether you’ve spent money on Pay-Per-Click, SEO, Social media or other advertising or not, you’ve still spent time and money building your site. Wouldn’t it be a shame if a crappy checkout process turned someone who is ready to buy around and sent them to a competitor?
This exact scenario happens thousands of times a day, and there’s really no need for it. Think of your checkout process from a customers point of view for a moment, it has one purpose and one purpose only:
MAKE IT EASY FOR ME TO GIVE YOU MY MONEY IN EXCHANGE FOR STUFF.
If any part of your checkout doesn’t help with the above then it needs to go. Does asking me to create an account, tell you my mother’s maiden name, where I was
born, and the name of my first pet help me? Does suddenly adding extra costs that weren’t made clear earlier help?
Once again, any part of your checkout that doesn’t help me quickly and easily hand over my cash should go. We took this approach with a client’s site recently and upped sales by nearly 40%. Now this checkout process was extraordinarily long winded and clunky to begin with, we’re not saying that revamping your checkout is a magic bullet, but even if you only got a 5% increase, think about what that would look like every month from here on in?
Google did a great viral video on what most online checkouts would be like if they were in a real store. Kind of seems obvious when it’s put like that doesn’t it?
