When it comes to addressing failure to convert checkout pages to successfully completed transactions it is often difficult to know where to start however the pareto principle of 80% of consequences coming from 20% of causes is definitely true in this situation and this article’s express purpose is to highlight those that when addressed will provide the biggest impact to increase checkout conversion.

The most important starting place should be fully understanding your checkout journey as until you understand at which specific stage you are loosing customers it is very difficult to apply the appropriate solution.

1 – Sign Up Friction – Checkout Page

We all understand the value of collecting contact details around our customers however one of the easiest ways to provide a better shopping experience is to stop forcing people to register or create an account.

If you customer is looking to make a quick purchase having to sign up will be viewed as unnecessary and they are likely to skip it and take their business elsewhere.

Giving your customer’s the choice as to whether or not to open an account should be the standard and marketing the required for them to provide an email address as requirement for sending the receipt will still satisfy your need to grow your contact database of users.

2 – Shipping Costs

In survey after survey around reasons customers abandon their cart unexpected costs is always high on the list and customer expectations around this topic have only been heightened since Amazon.

Tackling this problem is usually achieved via one of these methods –

• Hard bake the shipping costs into the product cost
• Provide free shipping and look to offset the cost against the increase in sales – performing some AB tests here is crucial to ensure the finances make sense
• Have shipping costs presented as early as possible and thus reduce any surprises at checkout

3 – Payment Journey

A surprising 48% of potential sales are lost after the customer has clicked pay. There are a number of reasons why this occurs from errors in the request, over zealous fraud rules or unnecessary friction during the payment process.

A crucial tool to use here is to review your payment success rate –

If your payment success rate (calculation shown below) is below 60% then it is definitely to consider a new payment service provider like Stripe, Mollie, Adyen etc or to speak to a payment science company like FERO.

4 – Retarget lost customers

A large reason for customers dropping off during the checkout process is because they were ‘just browsing’ and always had low likelihood of converting. However there is interest which can be harnessed and fuelled.

Using tools like Google Display Network, which serves display ads to people’s browsers on millions of websites. Once visitors leave your website, they will start viewing your ads while browsing, listening to music, or shopping on other stores on the internet. Captivating ads will leave a mark, encourage customers to revisit your website and increase checkout conversion.

Pixel-based retargeting lets you redeploy ads to people who’ve either looked through your website or clicked through to your landing page. Whereas List-based retargeting works after you already have someone’s contact information in your database. You use the email addresses that your existing customers provide to show them specific advertisements for products or services.

5 – Payment Options

We all know that not all customers are the same, there are demographic and geographic differentiators between us all however all to often we treat our customers the same when it comes to payment options.

Stripe recently made a change in its algorithm that shows the most relevant payment methods for each country. They report this saw a 3% increase in checkout conversion rates which is a great achievement and hints at the opportunity here.

Final Thoughts

We have gone through the core solutions to the biggest impactors to increase checkout conversion however in order to truly know the best solution you need to fully understand the problem. We at FERO offer a free analysis service that will forensically review your payment journey and bring to the surface the knowledge you require to ascertain the best solution.