The Nielsen Company did a survey on mobile commerce trends; they found that 40 percent of shoppers use mobile phones to purchase from online stores. Out of the entire shoppers’ community, on an average 69.89 percent of shoppers leave an e-commerce touch point without completing the checkout process. Furthermore, when Baymard Institute came up with another report on reasons shopping cart abandonment, most of them were found to be directly or indirectly linked to checkout pages and the overall checkout process.
(Image and Information source: Baymard Institute)
The checkout process is the soul of an eCommerce touchpoint
It is undoubtedly clear that mobile commerce is growing at an unprecedented rate and businesses are implementing innovative ways to entice shoppers with their mobile touchpoints. Be it a responsive mobile site or a dedicated mobile app, the efficacy of a mobile checkout process is important to meet the expected conversion goals. Mobile checkout improvement is majorly about optimizing the UI according to a small sized screen and utilizing the smart features to make it quick and interactive.
Hence, we did research on top-performing checkout pages to come up with these seven suggestions to optimize your overall mobile checkout process. So here it is.
How would you shape your mobile commerce checkout process?
We would expect you to work on the following mobile e-commerce best practices to work out a conversion friendly buying process for your mobile users:
1. Include a progress indicator
It is probably one of the most ignored but crucial mobile e-commerce best practices. The way experts treat it as a generic necessity, makes the feature critically required in any eCommerce checkout process.
The main aim of including a progress bar is to let your potential shoppers have a track of where they are at in the checkout process. A well-constructed progress bar will make your checkout transparent and inform them of how much more they need to cover more for completing the buying process.
PS: Experts suggest putting the progress bar on the top, i.e. above the fold on the checkout page.
(Image source: crazyegg.com)
2. Separate Quick buy buttons on the product page
The main aim of including this practice is to reduce the overall taps required to reach the checkout page. Though it is not an optimization tactic for checkout pages, we can see it as an overall checkout process optimization for sure.
Customers use ‘Add to cart’ button for selecting products they want to purchase. They click on this button one after another to add multiple corresponding products to their shopping cart and then that see the cart review page followed by the checkout page. It is good practice when customers intend to buy multiple products. However, it fails to offer a speedy process when buying a single product. In addition, customers might get distracted in the meantime.
To tackle this, you can put an extra “Buy Now” or “Quick Buy” button on the product page that will directly checkout with the particular product in the cart. It will improve your mobile checkout in the following ways:
- Reduce the number of click and taps required.
- Eliminate distractions from the customer’s buying intent.
- It will create a temporary parallel cart in addition to the regular cart.
- Save users from manually removing the products in the previously unpurchased cart.
- It will restore the previously unpurchased cart after completing the quick purchase.
(Image source: Amazon mobile app)
3. Make it feel safe and trustworthy
Unless you are a giant name like Amazon, Etsy, eBay and Alibaba people will hardly trust you for the security of their data, card details, and privacy. As a result, they hesitate to perform monetary transactions on your website.
They do not understand the technicality of the features but a simple language that proves the safety of their credentials. So, let them know about the methods you have adopted in the simplest form, and nothing is better than showing the seals of trust for the same. These seals let people understand that site is implemented with high-end security features and their data is safe with here. Of course, you should show them only when you have actually adopted the corresponding solutions.
Something like this following checkout process. They have displayed the seals on almost every page in the whole checkout process.
4. Reduce the form size
Checkout forms consume almost 90 percent of the whole checkout process. Not just space but also they consume a great deal of time. Especially in mobile checkout, they are the biggest obligation for the interested shoppers. The mobile e-commerce best practices to reduce this liability from the forms would include the following:
- Ask the least possible information from the buyers.
- Reduce the number of fields in the checkout form.
- Do not include fields you do not need. Like fax number and landline number etc.
- Have separate checkout forms for individual and business shoppers. For example, you do not need a VAT number field for an individual buyer.
- Autos fill all possible details from the sign-up records of the customers. Like Name, mobile number, Email address etc.
- Keep an option to let them choose the same billing and shipping address. Something like in this image:
(Image source: StackOverflow)
5. Allow checkout without registration- Guest checkout
About 37 percent of shoppers would abandon your shopping cart if you ask them to create an account to complete the checkout. Some customers see it as a time-consuming process and not all of them understand the necessity of this requirement for you to offer a personalized experience.
Nevertheless, you still need to convert these shoppers into final customers, even if they do not want something greater. Therefore, the best option here would be offering account registration as an option, and let them complete the purchase with guest checkout. This option would just ask for their name, email addresses, and mobile numbers to complete the checkout.
- You can use the email address and mobile number for automatically creating an account that they can use in the next purchase. In this way, you would get the information you need for account registration without asking for it directly.
- One better option would be to integrate social login. Using social login users will be able to instantly sign-up by just using their Facebook, Instagram, Google, or Twitter account. It is a one-click sign-up process and does not takes more than a few seconds.
This is how ‘Asos’ utilizes both Guest checkout and Social login to offer the best mobile checkout experience to the new users:
6. Allow them to modify products without re-directing
Once on the checkout page, it would be unfriendly to direct users anywhere outside the funnel. If you are directing users back to product pages for increasing or decreasing the number of products they want to buy, you are killing your conversion funnel by yourself.
The best practice would be to let them increase, decrease, or even remove a product from the cart directly on the checkout page itself. eBay utilizes Ajax based mobile shopping cart to let its users modify the product quantity without re-directing or re-loading the checkout page.
7. Let them know the shipping cost beforehand
Customers do not like surprises in terms of unexpected shipping costs and hidden taxes on the checkout page. About 23 percent of the shoppers would leave your site if they cannot calculate the order cost upfront before checking out. Shipping cost is one of the elements that decide the order total. People want you to unambiguously, mention the total order cost upfront in the shopping cart page itself.
Therefore, a best practice would be to mention the final shipping costs on the shopping cart page so that you would be able to display the expected order total even before going to the checkout page.
(Image Source: prototypr.io)
That’s it for seven must-include mobile commerce checkout practices. Realizing these suggestions will smoothen your checkout process for sure. Do you have any more suggestions for our readers? Feel free to share with us. Your expertise might help us implement some innovative ways to optimize the checkout processes in general.
Author Bio
I am a professional blogger, guest writer, Influencer & an eCommerce expert. Currently associated with ShopyGen as a content marketing strategist. I also report on the latest happenings and trends associated with the eCommerce industry.
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