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Simplify Your Checkout

One of the biggest enemies an e-commerce store owner faces is cart abandonment. Nothing can make you crazier than seeing all your best efforts evaporate with shoppers leaving the store at the worst time. While multiple factors can contribute to the disturbing phenomena, I'd like to focus on two common mistakes that every owner should take steps to rectify.

One sure contributor to cart abandonment is inconsistency between the main site design and the checkout design. Just the other day, I was ordering something from an e-commerce business. I was highly satisfied with my entire experience throughout surfing the site, finding what I wanted, and comparing it with other products. However, when I got to the checkout page to complete my shopping experience, I found that the cart and the main site seemed to have been two completely different design styles. This can jolt customers right out of the shopping experience, decreasing their confidence.

Secondly, there is much debate about how many pages a checkout process should include. So many e-commerce sites you see these days have an amazingly designed and categorized site, then when you get to the checkout, the entire process is crammed into one step. You may say, "One step, That's simple and streamlined," but it really isn't. A three step checkout will create a much more organized and user friendly shopping cart experience for your customers, and our research bears that out.

The cart in the store I mentioned previously was a one step checkout with a form full of needed information that seemed to continue for days. I was so disgruntled with the lack of organization of the cart that I completely abandoned my purchase. With this one step checkout, everything is on one page including, cart edits, shipping address, billing address, confirmations, and any other information you could think of that you might need from your customer.

The 3 step checkout will split all of this information up into different pages and give the customer a pleasant experience all the way through their purchase including purchasing your item. The first step in the 3 step checkout will give the customer the opportunity to make any changes necessary to their purchase. From this first step they can edit quantities of items, remove items, or even add related items if a cross-sell is available. Once the customer continues, they will be taken to the shipping and billing page. This page will allow them to enter in their shipping address, and a separate billing address, if necessary. Finally the third step will be a confirmation page for the customer to review his/her purchase before it is submitted. This page will display to the customer every item that they are purchasing, the quantities of the items, and the prices, including tax and shipping. Once the Customer confirms that the purchase is correct, they can click the place order button and submit their order to you.

This three step process is so much simpler than one step. With this process, all the information that you need from your customer is split up into 3 different pages that require very little, if any scrolling. My question is why would anyone want to force their customers to scroll and sort through 3 pages of information on one page, when they can split it up and make the process so much easier? As a storeowner you must ask yourself the same question.

Editiorial provided by Zack Sims, Developer at EYStudios. © 2009 EYStudios. All Rights Reserved."