Does your hosted checkout page fit into your website canvas?

You might have the best product or service in your industry. However, if your website offers a poor checkout experience, your sales will suffer. According to MarketSherpa, up to 59% of would be customers do not complete the checkout process on e-commerce websites. This means e-commerce store lose more than half of customers who are ready to buy.

Using different checkout page designs can lead to different results. One of the key contributing factors to checkout abandonment is lengthy, time-consuming input of information and overly convoluted forms. To avoid these, you can use sleeker web forms to improve the checkout process. UpsellIt digs deeper on the pros and cons of using different type of forms in this post.

Impact of Your Checkout Page on Conversions

The key to reducing cart abandonment rates is having an efficient checkout experience. Customers should be able to complete their purchase the first time they put items in the shopping cart. Designing an efficient checkout experience boils down to simplicity. Conversion rates can significantly increase when you set up your site’s checkout experience for the least amount of confusion and agony for the customer.

Your checkout page is the window separating the customer from the product. The page should be designed to encourage checkout completion with the least amount of pain. However, most of the time, the checkout page design is different from the website canvas. The page usually has minimal links or information that are typically found in other pages.  This is usually the case if you are using a third party billing subscription service provide to accept payments.

A checkout page that matches the design of your website canvas can improve sales. One of the biggest concerns of customers shopping online is the safety of the information they provide. Imagine a user who wants to buy your service but when he reaches the checkout page, he realizes the page is significantly different from other pages on your site. The customer is more than likely to abandon the shopping process.

To improve your checkout process, you need to make consumers feel that their information is safe with you. How do you achieve this?

• By ensuring the checkout pages has the same design as other pages of your site. This will reduce the fear of the customer that he is checking out on a third party website.
• By giving customers confidence that their data is safe. Use secure SSL protection to encrypt customer data, have a privacy policy page and provide automatic account protection such as automatic logging off after an extended period of time. You can also send customers automatic emails on log-ins and failed account log-ins.
• By having a shorter and seamless checkout process. The checkout should be completely linear, with users knowing what to do in every step. Avoid creating steps within steps that can confuse the user. Users are likely to abandon the checkout process due to such frustrations.

Setting up Your Checkout Page for Improved Conversions

The checkout page should be optimized for the best conversions. There are a number of things to keep in mind when designing checkout forms. The considerations fall into three main categories: design, content and security.

Design

The checkout page should fit with your website overall design. If you are using a third party billing subscription company to accept payments, look for a provider that can enable you to customize the checkout page. At ChargeBee, we allow checkout page customization.

The design is important to reassure customers that their orders are being processed on your website, even though this may not be the case. Customers may trust your brand but may be wary of giving out their credit card information at a third party website. With the ability to customize the look and feel of your checkout page, you can significantly reduce cart abandonment.

Content

The content on the checkout page can also affect conversions. Here, content refers to help notes on necessary fields and feedbacks that will enable customers know the type of data required in particular fields. The content should help customers complete the checkout process by giving important information on filling the fields.

Security

The security of your customers’ data should be paramount for your company. Make sure your checkout pages are secured with SSL and protected with a good web antivirus software. Studies have also shown that having trustmarks on your checkout page can increase conversions.

How have you optimized your checkout pages to improve conversions?