5 Ways to Speed Up the Checkout Process

A streamlined checkout process is the icing on the cake that your company needs if you are to succeed and avoid one of the biggest bugaboos of ecommerce businesses: shopping cart abandonment. 

Now that you have worked so hard to get traffic to your website, it’s vital to clinch the deal. Read on to discover the top five checkout optimization techniques.

1. Emphasize clarity

Confusion and frustration are two of the sharpest nails in any business’s checkout coffin. Reduce the chance that people will click away due to bewilderment or irritation, by working hard to show customers exactly what to expect during the whole process, including prominent messages about the precautions that you have taken to protect data security. 

That, along with a well-described return policy, will go a long way toward reducing shopper defections.

2. Show progress

Customers should always be able to see exactly where they are in the checkout process. Including a progress bar, breadcrumbs, or other design feature that indicate the distance to the figurative finish line will give them the information that they need.

3. Offer guest checkout

Have you ever been in a rush to complete a purchase, only to be confronted by the requirement to create a new account, including strong passwords, two-factor authentication, and even optional disclosure of hobbies and interests? 

There is a good chance that you greeted this necessity with some choice words, and might even have aborted the purchase altogether.

Making it possible for customers to complete their transactions as guests is the perfect way to get around this problem. Once the payment goes through, you certainly can and should incentivize them to create an account so that you can gain access to their detailed information. 

Offering package tracking details and a coupon for signing up is usually all it takes to achieve that goal.

4. Allow multi-channel purchasing

There are some online customers who prefer to browse your website to choose what they  buy, but also want to pay for it in person at your physical store using curbside pickup. While this scenario became particularly popular during the height of the pandemic, it remains a favorite method among some shoppers.

In order to speed up the parking lot checkout process, equip your staff members with contactless card readers. Paying the bill then becomes as easy as completing the touchless payment right at curbside.

5. Provide several payment options

Your merchant account provider, the same company that may have assisted you in setting up your physical store’s Tap to Pay on iPhone system, can also equip your ecommerce solution to roll out a full array of payment options to your online customers. 

In addition to standard credit card capabilities, these should also include debit and gift cards, digital wallets such as PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, and even the option to directly transfer funds from a bank account.

If you sell big-ticket items that might be difficult for some people to pay for all at once, another great option is recurring billing. This lets you set up an agreement to have a predetermined portion of what is owed withdrawn from the customer’s specified account on a set date and for a certain duration. 

When the checkout process is transparent, secure, and fast, your customer is much more likely to complete it. Support it with readily available and responsive customer care, and your chances of success rise even higher.