Optimising your checkout process

Photo by FootMassagez

If there’s just one area on your site that you focus on it should be your checkout process.

A small change here can have a big impact on your bottom line.

Focusing on optimising the shopping cart and checkout process is one of the quickest ways to increase revenues for your business.

What if I don’t have a checkout process?

Even if your website doesn’t sell things, improving the ease with which customers can input data on your site to enquire, apply for services or sign up to newsletters is an essential and fundamental area to improve your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Classic mistakes…

Having worked with many businesses over the years we’ve seen a wide range of mistakes that can seriously affect the performance of both your shopping cart widget* and the checkout process itself.

*What’s a widget? – it’s the interactive element that both adds an item to the shopping basket when you click “Buy Now” and usually it sits as an icon in the fixed element at the top of the web page.

For shopping cart widgets these issues range from bad widget design and placement, to poor or non-existent basket update advice as well as the loss of shopping cart items when users click the back button in the browser.

Checkout processes are generally more complex and varied but also have the opportunity for more, far ranging issues. These can include:-

• not recognising returning visitors when they come back to your site but before they login
• not remembering previously abandoned shopping cart contents
• bad login/register/guest checkout page design
• poor or unclear input box text labels
• not making it clear which input fields are mandatory
• input box sizing that doesn’t correspond to the required input data (e.g. full screen width boxes for a telephone number)
• poor or overzealous field validation and inefficient error messaging (a major issue)
• bad page design where buttons are hidden below the bottom of the screen (desktop, tablet and mobile)
• not using the browser pre-fill function

For more website design tips have a look at Top Homepage Design Tips or Top 5 Website Optimisation Tips