How to Improve Checkout Experience: 10 Easy Steps!

When users checkout, it's essential to ensure that the experience is as smooth and effective as possible. Customers who are frustrated while checking out are much more likely to abandon their transaction. This can lead to a lot of lost revenue for your business.

So how do you avoid customer frustration and improve the checkout experience? Here are ten tips from leading experts:

Why is Checkout Experience Important?

Checkout is one of the most critical parts of the customer's journey. As a merchant, you hope that someone will use your service, but if they aren't satisfied with the checkout experience, they'll leave you. This can lead to lost revenue and negative reviews. It's vital to ensure that your customers have a positive checkout experience because it helps increase loyalty and repeat purchases.

You want to encourage retention and attract repeat business, but you don't want to turn away one-time clients. Make sure a guest checkout is offered to consumers so that guests may purchase conveniently. Give first-time consumers the option to enter their email and finish making their purchase.

Steps to Increase Checkout Experience:

1. Allow guests to checkout

Have a feature in your checkout process that allows customers to leave their payment information at the beginning of their checkout process. This can be very helpful for new customers who are still deciding whether they should start a charge on a credit card. If someone has already committed to purchase, this would be an excellent time for them to check out.

This is also useful if some customers need assistance with payment. For example, if you sell expensive electronics, you may want to credit policy or have an "ask someone" option.

2. Allow social media logins

If you are selling a shoppable item and many customers want to share their purchases on social media, why not allow customers to use the social networks they like?

Facebook and Twitter were two of the first social networking sites that allowed people to sign up with their usernames. Moreover, it simplifies the checkout process for customers who are familiar with these sites.

3. Provide quick links with one click

Don't make customers hunt for things. Give them quick links with one click. An excellent example of this is eBay's "Welcome to eBay" page, which allows users to quickly search, add a new item, and sign up. If a customer is already signed in on Facebook, Twitter, or Google, allow them to use their social accounts to log into your service as well.

4. Be honest about mistakes

A good way to get repeat customers is by being honest about mistakes. If you think there is a mistake in the checkout process, let them know. A good example of this is Home Depot, where the customer tried to book a trip for $287 but was charged $2800 by mistake. They found he had been charged 17 times in the past.

Although this was embarrassing for Home Depot, it made other customers more comfortable that they were not being deceived and would never be tricked like this when they used their services.

5. Show a progress indicator

The more a customer knows about the status of their checkout process, the better. If a customer is unsure whether or not they have completed something, this can frustrate them.

For example, do you know what would have happened if Amazon didn't have a progress indicator for the checkout process? The customer would only see "thank you for your order" and nothing else.

6. Make editing orders simple.

If a customer is editing an order and they need to change the name of the shipping address, instructions, etc., it can be very frustrating. This can lead to many customer complaints.

However, you can easily solve this problem by allowing customers to edit their orders by emailing the details or calling your customer service team. In addition, allow them to send you a photo of the updated order so that you know how it should look.

7. Provide contact details

Don't make customers fill out your contact form whenever they want to give feedback or ask a question. These forms can frustrate customers and lead to negative reviews. A better idea is to provide your contact details on your website and give them the option to email you with a single click.

8. Be truthful about shipping fees

Some merchants over-charged their customers by charging shipping fees. This is not good for the customer who wants to avoid paying for shipping, and it can also be very bad for your business because you are losing money. For example, an online merchant who charged customers $20 for shipping became angry when a customer emailed him with a complaint.

The merchant emailed back and told the customer that he should have calculated the shipping charge before placing an order with him.

9. Keep track of empty carts

It is common for your customers to leave an empty cart. Be bold and ask the customer which items they didn't buy. You will probably know which items customers picked but left the site without buying. This is why it's called a "shopping cart."

10. Provide a button for payment methods

If you have several payment options, make sure that there's a button on your checkout process that allows customers to choose what they want to use to check out quickly and easily.

Conclusion

Anchor Operating System is a platform development firm that allows you to build highly interactive and customized checkout experiences. It has a super flexible UI, which means your users will have an excellent experience using your service. Moreover, the platform built by us is incredibly easy to use, so even if you are a novice developer, you can still use it to build great solutions for your business.

Anchor Operating System makes it easier to develop and deploy checkout pages so that you can focus on the other parts of your business. We set up a testing environment similar to Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and other platforms so that you can try out our platform without any risk involved. Contact us today, and we'll help you out.

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