If you own an eCommerce website then you know just how important your checkout page can be. Many small online business owners either think that any old checkout page will work or they try to get to fansy with their checkout page and it actually ends up costing them business. Our Phoenix web design team see it all the time. A client will come to us wanting to know how to improve conversion rates and when studying google they have a lot of people that drop off at the checkout page. Then we check the process and it is long and strenuous. That is why we came up with some simple rules to follow when it comes to your websites checkout page.
Rule 1: Your page must have one goal in mind and that is to allow the customer check out. There are so many websites out there that flood their checkout page with signups, other products, etc. You want try to avoid this process and make it as simple as possible for your customers otherwise they may get confused and frustrated and then leave your page. You would be surprised at just how frequently this happens.
Rule 2: People are hesitant when it comes to purchasing things online especially if it isn't from a website that is well known and trusted that is why you must do every thing you can to give them the assurance they need to make a purchase online. This would be things like make sure your site is secure and offer them extra assurance that you go above and beyond to make sure that their personal information is protected. Don't just offer credit card payments but also offer third party companies such as PayPal as this will give the big name they are looking for.
Rule 3: Make sure that you doing things that bring clarity to the user during the checkout process. One thing that I feel is very important that so many websites don't use is a status bar. A status bar is a bar showing what step you are on in the check out process and how many steps you have left. This let's the customer know they are almost done if they are getting impatient.
Rule 4: Rule 4 is all about time. Time is so important when it comes to your users converting. This means both the load time of your website as well as how long it takes somebody to checkout. If you were standing in line at Target you are not going to want to use a cashier that doesn't know what they are doing. You will go to the cashier that is moving the quickest and the same is true for the online world.
Rule 5: Make people confident in your products by social proofing them. Everyone knows that people gain more confidence in buying something if they have read a good review about it or heard one of their Facebook friends talking about. That is why you need to do everything you can to make sure your product has great reviews and is being talked about on all the major social media sites.
You spend to much time and money getting potential customers to your website to see them leave on the checkout page. Make sure that you follow these 5 simple rules and you should starting seeing you conversion rate go up for users that make it to the checkout page.