An optimized site can help to draw more business your way, whereas if you haven’t optimized, it can push that business to your competitors.

While creating an optimal customer experience is important for your website as a whole, the checkout page is a key area where most ecommerce businesses could use improvement. Cart abandonment is a very common consequence of less-than optimal checkouts, with an average abandonment rate close to 70%.

Your mission is to prevent cart abandonment as much as you possibly can, and instead encourage people to complete the checkout. Here are some tips for doing just that:

What does it mean to optimize your checkout?

The overarching goal of optimizing your checkout is to improve conversion rates, or the number of visits that result in a sale. Optimization can be looked at as removing or mitigating any roadblocks in the checkout process for the customer.

Some common optimization tasks include: minimizing distractions; helping to gain trust; reducing steps; and driving customers toward purchase. Every website will have its own set of priorities or key areas to optimize. 

Checkout optimization matters because most ecommerce merchants could stand to benefit from fewer abandoned carts. According to Baymard Institute, 17% of abandoned carts happen because the checkout process is too long or complex, while other top reasons such as having to create an account or surprise costs in the checkout could be mitigated by making some changes.

Key checkout metrics to improve

It’s important to know what you’re looking for and how you’re going to measure success. Here are some key metrics to keep track of:

• Cart abandonment rate. This is the percentage of visitors who add items to the shopping cart, but click away before completing checkout.
  
• Conversion rate. This is the number of people who made a purchase compared to the number who visited your website, expressed as a percentage. It is calculated by dividing the number of purchases by the number of sessions, then multiplying by 100.
  
• Average order value. This is the average amount customers spend at one time in your online store. While this isn’t always impacted specifically by checkout optimization, it can be (we’ll touch on some ways).
  
• Returning customer rate. This is the number of customers out of your total who have made a repeat purchase from your store. The checkout process is one aspect of many that can either encourage or discourage repeat business. 

Keep an eye on key checkout metrics so you can see if your optimization efforts have made a difference #woocommercecheckout
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Optimization tips

One of our first tips is that the default checkout process offered by your ecommerce platform (including WooCommerce), is not optimized for the best customer experience. There are flaws with most default checkouts, including things like extra form fields, confusing layouts and forced account creation.

Which leads to our second tip: there are often optimized checkouts that have been built for your particular ecommerce platform if you don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on customizations yourself. CheckoutWC does this for WooCommerce checkouts. 

If you want to go down the route of customizing yourself, or if you want a checklist of sorts for determining an optimized checkout solution, here are some key optimization tips:

Show checkout progress

You’ve probably had an experience online where you’ve wondered how much longer a particular task was going to take and whether you can be bothered finishing it. Various tests have shown a positive correlation between showing the customer their checkout progress and the number of completed checkouts.

A progress bar or similar helps to show shoppers the steps they need to complete checkout and how far along they are. It helps to set expectations rather than keep your customers guessing.

Never force account creation

Forced account creation comes in as the second-most common reason for cart abandonment. This happens when the customer is required to create an account just to complete checkout. In brief; just don’t do it. You can offer account sign-in for customers who would like it, but besides that, leave account creation until after checkout. Even better, if you use the details the customer already provided during checkout to create an account with one click, this makes it more likely they’ll decide to do it.

Be upfront about costs

Surprise costs are the number one reason people abandon the cart. This often comes down to shipping costs or other fees that are added during checkout. Large numbers of people will click away when they didn’t expect to pay that cost, even if it is a relatively minor shipping charge.

The best way to avoid surprising people is to be upfront. If you offer free shipping, tell people how they can get it. Otherwise, give people an idea of the cost – for example, “$8 flat rate shipping on all orders.”

Reduce distractions

Distractions at checkout include things like alternative navigation or complex menus. Customers can become confused or distracted, then abandon the cart. It’s better to reduce anything that has a customer click to a different area of your website.

Reduce form fields

Each new form field that a customer is required to fill out is a potential reason for them to leave. As a general rule, less is more. Only ask for exactly what you need so that you reduce the amount of time a customer has to spend on the checkout process.

Look at checkout flow

Checkout flow is a term to describe the order of operations of your checkout. The aim should be to make it as logical as possible for the customer and avoid confusion. Some checkouts have a strange flow, for example putting the billing address ahead of the shipping address. That’s not how customers generally expect to find it.

Make the cart easy to edit

Difficulty editing the cart can be another issue that falls under “checkout complexity.” Many customers are in the habit of browsing sites and adding items they are interested in to the cart. They then go back through the cart and want to be able to delete or edit as necessary. If you make this difficult, they’re likely to give up. 

Remember, a customer is not going to checkout unless they’re happy with the items in their cart so there’s no point in making it difficult to edit. The customer will more than likely look for an alternative option to order if your site puts up roadblocks.

Be upfront with your returns policy

Another reason customers give for abandoning the cart is that the returns policy either wasn’t satisfactory or wasn’t clear. You can help avoid this by having upfront links to your returns policy. Some retailers have the policy pop up as an overlay on screen if the customer clicks on it. This way, they haven’t left the cart but they still get to see the policy clearly.

Introduce cross-sells and/or upsells

Remember that average order value metric? Cross-sells or upsells offered during the checkout process (or right after) can be a great way to increase your average order value. At the same time, when done right these can offer value to the customer. For example, if they’re checking out an item that usually works with another product, you could offer that product as a cross-sell. Most people appreciate getting all the things they need in one order rather than discovering later that they needed that other product!

How to optimize your WooCommerce checkout

For all the WooCommerce store owners out there, the default checkout is not an optimal setup for your customers. The flow isn’t intuitive and there are too many form fields, among other issues.

CheckoutWC offers you a solution with our plugin that brings the best features of the Shopify checkout and makes them available on WooCommerce. Our solution reduces steps and form fields, and presents the customer with a beautiful, optimized checkout flow.

Ready to check it out? You can sign up for a free 7 day trial here.

The post How Do I Optimize My Checkout Page? appeared first on CheckoutWC.

It’s a critical issue for ecommerce businesses to address – 60% of people who abandoned carts have said they did so due to shipping costs.

With that being said, we wondered what shipping best practices there may be that actually help ecommerce stores with conversions. Here’s what we found:

You’ve got to be upfront about shipping

Customers hate (bad) surprises in the checkout. That includes an unexpected shipping cost or a shipping cost that seems too high for what they’re ordering. In fact, this is consistently one of the top reasons given for abandoning the cart.

Shipping shouldn’t be seen as a secondary part of an ecommerce business, it can actually operate as a sales strategy. Customers who are surprised by shipping costs often abandon the cart. Suddenly, the item that seemed like a good deal appears much more expensive. People have become used to Amazon’s “free shipping” options, often without considering they pay for membership. It’s fair to say, expectations are high.

For conversion’s sake, it helps to be upfront about the cost of shipping. Let customers know early what to expect so they don’t get a shock in the final stages of the shopping cart. Of course, your shipping strategy will play a role in what exactly being “upfront” looks like…

Shipping strategy can be part of your wider ecommerce sales strategy
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Have a clear shipping strategy

Ecommerce businesses often don’t think of shipping as part of the strategy of their business, but in truth, you can devise a shipping strategy that is linked to any specific sales or business goals you have. Here are some to consider:

Price has to be a crucial component of any shipping strategy, as it’s the most frequently cited reason for ditching the sale. How you price your shipping will directly influence your conversion rates and your profit margins.

One of the big issues ecommerce businesses strike when devising a pricing strategy is the balance between offering what customers want (which, let’s face it, is generally that you charge as little as possible) and remaining profitable. It can be a tricky one to manage, especially if you offer products of different sizes and weights. Naturally, you’re going to pay different amounts for shipping depending on how the order is made up.

What do shoppers want? Naturally, most will say “free shipping,” but a Pitney Bowes survey of shoppers also found:

• 88% said that free shipping with 5-7 day delivery time is more attractive than paying a fee for 1-2 day faster delivery
• 3 in 5 consumers have increased their total spend in the past to qualify for free shipping
• 93% of consumers say shipping options are an important factor in their online shopping experience.

Options. Customers want options and that’s an important thing to consider for your shipping strategy. Of course, different ecommerce stores have different target customers with varying needs – one of the best things to do when determining your shipping strategy is to survey your own customers (or an audience made up of people who represent your target customer). Find out what really matters to them, for example, speed of delivery versus cost of shipping.

Ecommerce shipping options

Let’s look a little more closely at common ecommerce shipping options:

Free shipping

Free shipping is one many e-tailers struggle with. Shipping is expensive! Offering it for free can hurt your profitability, especially if you’re a small business.

On the other hand, free shipping checks the box in terms of “no surprises” for the customer and in general, it does positively correlate with conversions. (Of course, you have to do your own testing on this. Shipping cost is just one of several potential reasons someone might abandon the cart…)

Many smaller ecommerce businesses take the strategy of only offering free shipping on orders where they know they’ll make enough on the sale to cover shipping and still make a profit. That’s where “free shipping on orders over $X” comes in.

It involves doing a little homework. You need to look at your profit margins and run some scenarios to see where free shipping becomes profitable. Free shipping tends to be a “win some, lose some” deal. Some orders might see you barely break even, while others will be profitable. Taking a monthly view of averages tends to be better than freaking out over an order where the shipping costs sliced out profits. So as long as you work out with a reasonable monthly profit (whatever that looks like to you), free shipping might work.

You could also build some shipping cost into the price point of your products. This also tends to be a balancing act – shoppers who are price conscious will compare you to any competitors. You might still come out on top though, especially if competitor’s make up for their prices with additional shipping costs. Again, research is the key. Include competitor research in your shipping strategy.

Lastly, look at delivery timeframes. You’re not Amazon with endless resources and lucrative postal contracts. If you offer free shipping, it’s not going to be within two days for the customer. It’s important to know what you can offer so you can be transparent with the customer.

Flat rate shipping

Flat rate shipping might look like $10 per order, no matter what or how much is ordered, or, you might go for a table rate structure.

Table rates mean that the shipping rate changes according to whatever conditions you set. For example, maybe you can offer $5 shipping to residents of California, but $8 for residents of other states. Or, you might do something like $10 shipping for orders up to $50, $5 for orders up to $100 and free shipping for all orders over $100. Charging according to the weight of the order or charging according to speed of delivery are other ways to do it.

The pros of flat rate shipping are that it’s easy to explain to the customer. You can put your rates upfront, by showing them on your product pages or your homepage. Charging for shipping on lower value orders should also help offset your costs on the free shipping orders. It’s not perfect – you’ll still win some and lose some. However again, as long as your monthly average works out at a profit, you’ll be fine.

If you opt for flat rate shipping, do some testing and recording to see what works out best for you. Will you be better off charging for order value, or for weight?

Exact cost of shipping

There are live shipping calculators available (which you can use with your WooCommerce checkout) that will calculate exactly how much shipping will cost, according to the weight of the product and the destination for delivery.

While this shipping method doesn’t eliminate the surprise factor for the customer, in some product niches, it will be helpful for conversions. For example, B2B customers buying large, heavy items are probably less worried that they actually have to pay for shipping, and more concerned that you’re not somehow ripping them off by overcharging for shipping. A live calculator shows them that you’re not picking a number at random.

If you sell large items, using a live shipping calculator may be your only choice to ensure you don’t lose money on shipping the item. If you ship large items regularly, it’s important to negotiate good rates with your carrier that you’re able to pass on to customers. It could be a difference between you and competitors – others might have more costly shipping, or might offer free shipping with a higher price point for the item.

Final thoughts

Okay, so there is a lot to consider when it comes to ecommerce shipping best practices. The one universal best practice is to be upfront with your customers. Avoid surprising them in the cart with shipping costs – they should know those are coming!

In terms of other best practices, viewing shipping as part of your sales or marketing strategy is a good one to embrace. That means what works best for you may not be the best solution for a different ecommerce store.

Lastly, it’s obviously important to find that balance between appealing to customers and profitability. Research, test and find the shipping strategy that delivers conversions AND profits.

The post Ecommerce Shipping Best Practices: What Helps Conversions? appeared first on CheckoutWC.

Fortunately, if you’re using WooCommerce, you have a lot of flexibility about what you do and how you go about it. One of those areas to look into is your payment options.

Having multiple options available has been shown to help boost conversions because it increases the likelihood you’re offering something the customer wants to use. Customers also like simple, easy checkout flows, so that should also be a consideration for making payments.

Here’s what you should know about payment gateways, express checkouts and your options for WooCommerce:

Why use payment gateways?

Payment gateways act as a “middleman” for all transactions on your site. Safety, trust and reliability are key goals for accepting online payments and a good payment gateway takes care of all of those things.

One study found that around 90% of login attempts to online retailer’s websites were hacking attempts. You don’t want to be responsible for storing and managing payment details because this puts you at high risk. An offsite payment gateway provides that extra buffer of encryption between would-be hackers and your customer’s payment details.

Another important reason to use an offsite payment gateway is that your customers are (mostly) already very familiar with them. Gateways such as PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay have millions of regular users. People see the familiar logos and this helps to give them more trust in your website. For example, they know that using PayPal to checkout on an unfamiliar website protects them in case the merchant is disreputable or making misrepresentations about their products.

Thirdly, customers who already know and use particular payment gateways want those as an option. It saves them from digging out their credit card or entering other payment details that are already stored on the gateway. This can also help to facilitate “impulse” buys. You know, when you’re browsing while waiting around somewhere and decide to make a purchase. A express payment gateway can make this happen quickly, without needing to remember your wallet.

What is express checkout?

Express checkout is an option now available across multiple different payment providers. It involves your customers being able to checkout with as close to one click as possible. For example, if you have a PayPal Express Checkout button, customers click on that, it takes them to their account to verify the payment, then they’re taken back to your checkout, where the account pre-populates their shipping details.

Some of the benefits of express checkouts include:

• Quick, easy checkouts for customers.
• Keeps buyers on-track. (There are different options – some take them away from your checkout page and others stay within your checkout as an “integrated” checkout flow).
• Simple design and layout. These checkout options are usually well-optimized to encourage customers to go through with the purchase.
• Consistency across different devices.
• Faster load speed of your pages.
• Improved customer experience.
• Optimized for mobile.

That last point has become more critical over the last few years. Mobile transactions have been growing and mobile shoppers have been quick to adopt one-click checkout options. While most express options require shoppers to register first, once they’ve done so, all future transactions are significantly streamlined. It makes sense to consider express checkout, especially if your visitor data shows a large amount of mobile traffic.

Express checkout options help to boost ecommerce conversions
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Does express checkout help conversions?

There is evidence to show that express checkout can encourage more conversions. As a general rule, making things easier for the customer helps, and this is the goal. Some early data on PayPal Express found that online merchants who offered it saw:

• a 44% increase in conversions due to fewer clicks, fewer screens and the trustworthy PayPal name
• a 5.3% increase in new buyers, with up to 83% of PayPal buyers being first-time customers
• a 2.7% increase in transaction value.

Payment gateways are about the user experience you create. They mean reducing any hoops the customer has to jump through in order to complete their checkout. There is evidence to show that offering more of the payment methods your customers want can help to boost your conversion rates.

Notably, there are regional variations in terms of payment preferences so it’s important to do your research, especially if you’re selling in multiple different markets. Some areas show a preference for off-site payment gateways, while others do not.

Another point of note is that there’s a growing trend for “alternative payment methods.” These include things like mobile wallets, instant financing and try-before-you-buy options. For example, AfterPay allows people to split up their payments for an item. If someone already has an AfterPay account, it’s effectively an express checkout.

Alternative payment methods may be worth looking into, especially if your store sells some bigger-ticket or more expensive items. A shopper might hesitate to spend $300 in one hit, but go ahead with the purchase when they see they can break it up into four payments.

Choosing your payment methods

With so many options available, how should you choose the payment methods you will offer? The main piece of advice is to look very carefully at who your customers are and what their preferences are. For example:

• How do they usually shop? Which devices do they use?
• Who are they? What is their demographic information and what interests do they have?
• Where are they located? What are the most popular payment options for their location?
• What are your competitors offering?

What are your express checkout options?

CheckoutWC supports multiple different payment gateways which you can find here. Some examples include:

• PayPal for WooCommerce – PayPal Express is a widely used express checkout option that is available on many websites. We use PayPal for WooCommerce from AngelEye, but there are others too.
• Klarna Pay/Klarna Checkout – This is another “alternative payment” method that provides instant financing (particularly once the shopper already has an account).
• Amazon Pay – An express checkout option that allows shoppers to access their payment details stored with Amazon in just one click.
• Stripe – This also gives you access to support both Apple Pay and Google Pay. Stripe can also support recurring payments, which you may require if any of your products are on subscription. There are multiple gateway options for Stripe, including the official gateway, and Stripe for WooCommerce from PaymentPlugins.
• Braintree for WooCommerce – Braintree for WooCommerce supports several express checkout options: Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal Express. (And of course the normal, non-express Braintree CC gateway)

Final thoughts

Express checkout, payment gateway and alternative payment options can help to improve your customer experience and boost conversions.

Express checkout helps to streamline the experience and remove some of the “hoops” a shopper would otherwise have to deal with. It’s especially good from the perspective of mobile shoppers because it helps to reduce the number of inputs they need to make on a small screen.

As a WooCommerce store owner, you have a huge amount of flexibility to offer different options. We outlined a few that work with CheckoutWC above, but of course you can also look at some of the alternative payment methods that are out there. The bottom line is your customers want options, so help your sales by giving them what they want!

The post Express Checkout: What Are Your Options? appeared first on CheckoutWC.

BuiltWith reported that over 3.8 million websites are using WooCommerce. In fact, around 26% of the top 1 million ecommerce sites use WooCommerce to power their checkout operations.

We love WooCommerce for its versatility and ability to be adapted for a range of different businesses, however, in its default format, there are a number of flaws. Here’s why it’s worth upgrading to a custom version:

Issues with WooCommerce default settings

Any time we talk about ecommerce, the checkout experience has to be a critical factor. Shopping cart abandonment is a major issue with the average cart abandonment rate across all types of stores hovering around 69-70%. Given how much money you might spend or how hard you might work to drive traffic to your website, it’s not great to lose so many!

Ecommerce store owners should always aim for the user experience to be as smooth as possible, encouraging shoppers to complete checkout. Here is where default WooCommerce isn’t so great – there are several aspects to it that impede the user experience:

Smooth out the WooCommerce checkout experience to improve your conversions
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Form fields can be too much for the customer

The default version of WooCommerce presents the customer with a wall of form fields to fill out. First and last names go into separate fields, optional fields often aren’t clear that they’re optional, and the customer is left to decipher what goes next because there is little room for explanation.

Consistently over years of cart abandonment studies, it has been found that customers give up when they perceive that the checkout process is too lengthy. Sometimes they feel the ecommerce store is asking for too much information, or sometimes they simply get frustrated with how long the process is. They can’t see that they’re making progress so they simply leave.

Lack of automated input

There are several aspects to checking out that can be automated, especially when it comes to address inputs on forms. Default WooCommerce doesn’t have those things, leaving the customer to fill everything out themselves.

For example, it is possible to have an autocomplete for addresses where the Google Places Autocomplete API is enabled. This can save the customer from filling in multiple fields. At a more basic level, you can have the ZIP code automatically pull up the city and state.

It’s all about removing potential barriers for customers. You can certainly help those “impulse buys” along if it takes seconds to fill out the form fields, whereas when there are a lot of fields to fill out, the customer might think “I’ll come back to this later,” then never complete it.

There isn’t room for explanations

Shoppers have a number of concerns when making purchases online, with privacy and security being right at the top. For this reason, it can be a good idea to explain why you’re asking for certain information and reassure them that their privacy will be respected.

Default WooCommerce doesn’t make room for providing an explanation. For example, one place where you might want one is if you’re asking for a phone number; customers usually want to know why you need that.

Confusion over address

Default WooCommerce has customers fill out their billing address first, rather than their shipping address. This is a confusing layout because most would expect to have to put their shipping address first.

Furthermore, that billing address isn’t associated with the payment section where it really belongs. It’s easy to see how this creates a backward experience for customers!

Shipping and payment options in a strange place

On default WooCommerce, you’ll find the shipping and payment options embedded within the order summary, which is illogical. When you think about what makes for a smooth experience for customers, it tends to be one where they go through checkout in a logical, step-by-step order. The default setting of embedding those payment and shipping options in the summary doesn’t make sense because the customer has to decipher what to do, instead of being taken through a logical process.

In addition, the overall design appeal of those two key items is lacking. Key features, such as option selections, don’t stand out well and can add to a sort of ambiguous impression for customers.

Checkout flow doesn’t flow

The best checkout experiences are logical and linear for the customer. Step one goes into step two, and so on. The default WooCommerce setup attempts to be linear, but fails to pull it off well as the steps of the checkout flow are placed all over the page.

The collective experience of thousands of ecommerce stores suggests that an illogical checkout flow is a great way to lose customers. The more you can simplify, the better.

Account creation is confusing

The way the default version of WooCommerce flows, the customer has to evaluate whether they need to create an account to check out with first. It’s not forcing them to create one, but the roadblock is there – do I need an account? Don’t I?

When the customer feels forced to create an account, it often causes them to abandon their purchase. Around 28% give their reason for abandonment as “the site wanted me to create an account.”

Account creation prior to checkout plays into people’s concerns over why you want their information. Best practice is to offer account creation afterwards, which means WooCommerce’s default method is adding confusion.

The thank you page is confusing

What does a customer need from a thank you page? Mainly, assurance that their order has been received correctly. They’ll also want other key information that helps them to know what’s happening next.

WooCommerce’s default thank you page is not ideal because it doesn’t present that information in such a way as to reassure the shopper. It’s important to remember that in the world of ecommerce, interactions after the purchase matter too. It’s all about strong communication and assuring the customer they’ve made a good decision.

You don’t have to stick with default WooCommerce

Fortunately, (and because WooCommerce genuinely is a great platform), there are ways to work around the issues with the default checkout. For starters, given that WooCommerce is an open source platform, you can make coding changes to tweak how it looks. You can also add plugins for functionality, and there are hundreds of those to choose from.

In terms of usability, WooCommerce can be a steeper learning curve, especially if you don’t have prior coding knowledge. Learning to create a shopping cart experience that looks how you want it to and avoids the pitfalls of the default mode can be tricky.

Shopify is often held up as an ideal model because its checkout incorporates best practices AND it’s easy, even for complete newbs to learn. However, it’s also possible to get the best of Shopify features by opting for a pre-built checkout design for WooCommerce – you get the ideal design features, along with the flexibility of WooCommerce. This is where CheckoutWC comes in – our optimized checkout page replaces the default WooCommerce with a beautiful design, made to encourage shoppers to complete their purchase. In essence, we eliminate the pain points of the original WooCommerce design.

You don’t have to stick with default WooCommerce, and honestly, you shouldn’t. Every ecommerce store needs to follow checkout flow best practices in order to maximize opportunities for conversions. Look for a solution that eliminates the sticking points with the default version and optimizes user experience. If you want to check out our solution, we offer a free seven-day trial here.

The post Why Default WooCommerce Shouldn’t Be Your Default appeared first on CheckoutWC.