Chapter 6: Improving the Checkout Process

Many sites looking to capitalize on the holiday season spending spree put a great deal of time and effort into getting traffic – but then visitors fall through the cracks during the checkout process.

The key is to make check-out as easy and convenient as possible every step of the way. But how?  This chapter will give you all the details.

Check-out is not the time to burden or distract users with “quick surveys” or other popup nonsense. Even nudging shoppers to sign up for your mailing list while they’re in the middle of browsing could backfire on you. Likewise with forcing users to create an account before they can check out.

All of these steps throw stumbling blocks in their way, however real your intentions might be to glean some more data from the interaction.

With that being said, here are some more steps that make checking out easy and flawless from start to finish.

We’ve covered mobile-responsive designs already, but mobile-friendly e-commerce themes and layouts are going to be in even greater focus for the 2013 shopping season.

The fact is, customers are just a mere tap away from leaving your site.  Enterprise business-level solutions like Mobify and Shopify include responsive mobile shopping carts, so that customers can order and checkout at the push of a button.

According to Shopify, mobile ecommerce has doubled from
2012 to 2013.  Now is not the time to be left behind!

 

Two other concerns for your customers are security and safety.  With so much money changing hands digitally around this time of year, hackers and scammers are looking for holes and vulnerabilities they can exploit to gain access to your money and your personal information.

It’s more important than ever to put security first.  Some of the most trusted security seals to sign up for include:

• Norton Secure Site (Symantec SSL) – The Norton Security seal also appears in search results, letting customers know at-a-glance that your site is secure against hackers and malware.
• McAee SECURE (formerly HackerSafe)

While there may be other “trust seals” out there, both of these sites are household names because of their association with antivirus software, even though their services encompass much more today. By having these names on your site, you can leverage their trust-factor on your own site.

Beyond site security, customers also want to ensure their credit card information is safe.  Both Visa and Mastercard have started their own initiatives to add an extra layer of security to online transactions:

• V.me by Visa
• Mastercard Securecode

Services like V.me from Visa and MasterCard SecureCode helps
prevent unauthorized credit card use when customers checkout
on your site

 

Most businesses are secure enough by using services like these to prevent credit card fraud and unauthorized access and hacking for sites, but businesses in ultra-competitive industries or those who sell high-end products may need to work a little harder to convince customers to shop with them.

Fortunately, there are customer service review sites that allow customers and “mystery shoppers” to rate and review how well your customer support team responds to inquiries, tickets and overall handling of issues.  These sites include:

• BizRate Ratings
• StellaService

Will making all these changes guarantee an increase in your conversion rate this holiday season?  The only way to know with absolute certainty is to test.

Some sites experience phenomenal results with things like customer service and trust-related seals.  Others may not.  What works for one person as a best practice may not work for someone else.  The only true way to know is to test for yourself and determine what connects best with your target audience.

That being said, it’s important to have your measurement and analytics systems in place well before the holiday season. If you’ve put off the process because it seems too overwhelming and technical, you’re in luck. There are plenty of robust and reliable analytics platforms that allow you to A/B split test, measure, track and optimize your pages from start to finish.  These include:

• CrazyEgg Heatmap Tracking (yeah, we’re biased!) – See a visual overview of where visitors are looking on your pages with affordable tracking. Beyond heatmaps, CrazyEgg will also show you who clicked what, and where scrollers’ attention fades when reading your website.
• KISSmetrics – Track your visitors and where each one goes, what they click on, how long they stay and more. Uncover valuable customer information that Google Analytics won’t (and can’t) tell you.
• Visual Website Optimizer – Includes split testing and multivariate testing functionality as well as user testing to determine where customers are leaving (and what you can do about it).

Customers want to know they’re being taken care of, that their loyalty is being rewarded.

One of the best ways to give back to the people who have gotten you where you are is to offer them some limited-time exclusives – deals or products that no one else gets.  You can do this through your mailing list segments, adjusting customers by order amount or volume (or both!)

Few companies are truly attentive to their customers during the checkout process. By following these tips, you can be one of those companies that does an exemplary job of keeping the customer first.

But what happens once the order is placed?  Most ecommerce sites simply send out an order confirmation and, if you’re lucky, a shipping confirmation with the tracking number.

You can go beyond the typical canned responses and turn every order into a lucrative opportunity to retarget customers to come back and shop again soon.

In the next chapter, we’ll take a closer look at an often-forgotten area of sales where you can build up feelings of excitement and anticipation – the shipping and delivery process.

 

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