We’ve been developing eCommerce sites for over ten years now and understand how important it is to make the process of someone landing on the site to checking out is. Some of our longest-standing eCommerce customers like Clothspot & Online Ceramicsare local to us right here in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire and we’ve helped them grow from side projects to successful businesses.
The most important part of designing an eCommerce site is the checkout process. You’ll be aiming to get the customers to the product they want and get them through checkout as fast as possible to avoid a potentially abandoned cart.
Over the years we’ve tried a few different versions of this but we’re confident with the steps outlined in this post you’ll be making the checkout process the smoothest it can be for your customers.
How eCommerce Web Design affects checkout
The first thing you should consider when looking at a smooth checkout process is the design of your website. There are a lot of different aspects to consider here, but we’re going to focus on the product page journey for now.
It’s easy to fill the product page with helpful information, but don’t let this push the add to cart button down the page. This wants to be front and centre and obvious to anybody wanting to quickly add your product to the cart.
Your add to cart button also doesn’t want to be overshadowed by anything else, make it stand out with a bright brand colour so peoples eyes are drawn to it. This is the same principals that retailers use to draw your attention to sales, membership offers etc. Cestrian has a great article about this explaining how different colours are used and why.
All your eCommerce buttons should follow this principle to ensure people can quickly get through the site without any hassle.
Utilising payment gateways to make your eCommerce checkout easier
With the introduction of things like Apple Pay & Google Pay, you can make your purchasing even easier for your customers, especially on mobile devices.
Last year it was reported that 65% of all eCommerce traffic was on mobile. So it’s important to pay attention to this experience and Apple Pay & Google Pay is an easy way to make purchases quicker and easier. WooCommerce offers this functionality by using the Stripe payment gateway.
The best part of these payment options is they’re all done on the page without any need to go to the cart/checkout making them the quickest possible option for people to use.
Another option to consider is PayPal Checkout which adds two buttons to your product page allowing people to either go straight to PayPal and pay or they can fill in the checkout on the product page and then be taken to the checkout to confirm their purchase. WooCommerce has a free PayPal Checkout plugin to add this functionality.
Introducing Klarna
You may have noticed this next suggestion on a lot of eCommerce sites you use and that is Klarna. A buy now, pay later service which is becoming extremely popular and is a nice option for you to offer to your customers.
Serving over 90 million customers, Klarna is now found on over 58,000 websitesincluding sites like Disney Plus, Ebay, ASOS & Shein as a way to provide more options for customers.
When introducing Klarna to WooCommerce you have two options, Klarna Payments & Klarna Checkout. Klarna Payments integrates into your existing checkout as an alternative payment option. Klarna Checkout is the one that is designed around increasing sales & customer loyalty by keeping them under one roof.
Make life easy for returning customers
There are a few simple things you can do to make the checkout process easier for customers when they return to your site.
First of all, turn on the option for customers to create an account at checkout. This means when they return, they can quickly log in and not have to worry about filling in their address details again. Some payment gateways will even offer the ability to store the card details if a customer opts in to have it stored, so make sure you turn that setting on.
Consider adding functionality like repeat orders, this will quickly allow customers to place an order again without having to and find all the products in their last order.
Another option is utilising follow up emails. This allows you to send follow up emails to customers after they made a purchase for things like leaving reviews, tweeting about what they’ve purchased etc. According to the Direct Marketing Association the ROI on email marketing is $43 for every dollar spent so it can be an easy & cheap way to draw people back and spend some more and having an optimised checkout makes it even easier for customers to come back and make another purchase.
Finally using an abandoned cart notification plugin could secure you a sale that you may have otherwise lost. Not only does this plugin allow you to send people a notification that they added something to the cart and left it, it also gives you reports on any abandoned carts with the cart details, and recovered carts with completed details, personalise emails, enable abandon cart emails for guest users using a modal popup for pre-capturing there email and much more.
