71% of consumers expect personalisation from the companies they interact with, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. 

But many smaller e-commerce brands aren’t making the most of this expectation. It’s why checking out of a Shopify-based website can feel painful when you compare it to a site like Amazon.

After speaking with many e-commerce founders, it seems these brands fall short because they expect personalisation solutions to be too expensive, or they’re just not sure how to get started. They may think it’s something that only works for bigger brands. And for many, the checkout conversion rate is simply not closely monitored or worked upon at all – so there’s often low hanging fruit to be found.

What does a personalised checkout experience look like? 

Personalisation is a sliding scale. There are basic changes you can implement yourself, more advanced changes you can try out with apps and tools, and highly advanced changes that require constant experimentation and analysis. 

Airlines and booking platforms, for example, will have entire teams dedicated to optimising the checkout experience for each individual user. But even if you’re working alone, or with a small team, you can still have a big impact – and quickly.

Basic examples of personalisation: 

• Showing the preferred payment method, shipping rates and address format in the customer’s country 
• Showing the actual products the customer abandoned in any abandoned cart emails

These changes are primarily designed to reduce friction. 22% of customers who abandon their cart do so because the checkout process is too long and complicated; anything you can do to shave time off this process will offer an instant benefit. 

More advanced examples of personalisation:

• Upselling and recommending related products (which can also help push the order value over the free shipping minimum) 
• Predicting the customer’s preferred payment method based on their country combined with other demographic and behavioural data points
• Predicting each customer’s potential reason for abandoning their cart (using various data points), and adding messaging to the checkout page to counteract this

One change, huge uplift: a mini personalisation case study 

Kate, who is part of the marketing team at Irresistible Me (a US-based hair accessories brand), shared the incredible impact that dynamic, personalised product recommendations had on their brand: 

“We introduced personalised product recommendations at checkout, showcasing the items that complemented the customer’s previous purchases and browsing history. We also revamped our abandoned cart emails to include these tailored suggestions. This approach resulted in a 25% (approximate) increase in conversion rate over six weeks.”

How to get started with personalisation

“The problem with traditional conversion rate optimisation is that without detailed insights, it comes down to little more than trial and error – which is perhaps why 88% of tests do not win”, explains our co-founder, Chris Stein. And he should know; he has spent years working within the optimisation space. 

We built FERO to be a better alternative for smaller e-commerce brands, who don’t have the internal resources or volume of traffic that make conversion testing easier to scale. 

FERO is a Shopify app that draws on 430 unique data points to present the ideal checkout journey to each customer, without the enterprise price tag. It helps founders improve their checkout conversion rate on autopilot – and fast. 

As Chris explains, “Our clients would rather move quickly on multiple changes that statistically have a good chance of working than wait for 100% confirmation that one does – and it’s working for them.” Try FERO free for 30 days.