The shopper is acquired. The product is in the cart. The consumer is on the checkout page. This is it. Make or break time. Will the shopper click buy or abandon the cart?
This is where online retailers hold their breath to see if they can get this shopper across the finish line.
That means the checkout interface is pretty darn important. Retailers need to pay special care to many factors including how many fields they require shoppers to fill out, how many pages are in the checkout experience, how many and which payment options are offered, if returning customers save their information and what fraud prevention measures are in place.
All these factors matter to both retailers and shoppers.
32% of online shoppers say a fast checkout would lead them to place an order online, according to a Digital Commerce 360/Bizrate Insights survey of 1,060 online shoppers in January 2023.
For merchants, 44% of retailers said investments to key pages like the shopping cart were very important to improving their conversion rates, and 37% rated it a somewhat important, according to a Digital Commerce 360 survey of 75 online retailers in February 2023. In that same survey, 29% of retailers said investment in reducing the steps at checkout was very important and 38% said somewhat important to improving conversion rates.
The May 2023 Strategy Insights, “The perfect purchase experience,” dives into three aspects of the checkout experience: the growing trend of offering buy now, pay later, the ways in which artificial intelligence can enhance fraud prevention and the nascent landscape of paying with cryptocurrency.
Retailers should pay close attention to what types of payment methods shoppers want to pay for goods. Because if the right option isn’t there, they will abandon their carts. The vast majority of Top 1000 retailers allow shoppers to pay with credit cards. But other budding payment methods are worth taking a look at. At 55%, the majority of Top 1000 online retailers allow shoppers to pay in installments. That’s up considerably from just a few years ago, when only 28.2% of Top 1000 retailers offered buy now, pay later in 2020. If merchants haven’t considered offering buy now, pay later to their shoppers, now might be the time to look into it.
But what about merchants that have a different type of clientele than shoppers looking to spread out payments? Perhaps cryptocurrency is more the right fit of a payment method to offer those shoppers. Only 2% of the Top 1000 online retailers offer this payment method. But that still is notable for a form of currency that didn’t exist 15 years ago and isn’t backed by a government.
And of course, the checkout problem all merchants battle: fraud. Most retailers have implemented some type of fraud prevention software. But criminals learn and adjust. And technology needs to keep up. Many have implemented artificial intelligence as the answer to this perennial problem.
So take a moment to dive into these articles to learn how online retailers are improving their checkout pages, the results they’ve seen and what investments are worth it.
